Analysis for buyers,
not for vendors.
What we learn benchmarking 25+ networks all year, written down, comparisons, market notes and the occasional strong opinion.
- The CDN renewal playbookp.2
- How to choose a CDN in 2026p.3
- What happened to ChinaCachep.4
- Delivery into Russia and the CISp.5
Trusted by 100+ enterprises worldwide
From the advisory desk.
Provider head-to-heads have moved to their own section: CDN comparisons →
What happened to ChinaCache, and what it teaches.
China's first CDN went from pioneer to acquired brand in four years; the lesson is about the licence, not the company.
CDN delivery into Russia and the CIS in 2026.
Who carries the bytes now that Cloudflare is throttled there, and what the compliance regime costs a Western buyer.
Cloudflare alternatives in 2026: when leaving actually pays.
Four reasons teams leave, four different answers — and two where staying is correct.
Edge AI inference: what the CDNs are actually selling.
GPUs sit in tens of sites, not thousands. Which workloads that geography actually helps.
Data sovereignty became a delivery problem.
Residency is where bytes sit. Sovereignty is who can compel access. Only one is a CDN setting.
Post-quantum TLS at the edge: where it already works.
Browser-to-edge is hybrid today. Edge-to-origin usually is not. What to check now.
Pay-per-crawl: the AI-crawler toll economy arrives.
Bots passed humans on the web. A price is now wired into HTTP itself, via the dormant 402 code.
47-day certificates: what breaks at the 2027 step.
Everyone quotes 2029. The milestone that breaks real estates is 100-day certs in March 2027.
A/B testing at the edge without killing your cache.
Experimentation and caching are natural enemies. The assignment-at-edge patterns that make peace.
Running a fair CDN bake-off.
How to benchmark providers on your own traffic without fooling yourself.
Preload, prefetch and 103 Early Hints: spending idle milliseconds.
The resource-hint toolbox: what each hint promises, what it costs, and the misuse that makes pages slower.
Implementing RUM properly: a field guide.
Beacons, attribution, sampling and the traps between the timing APIs and the truth.
Deploying edge configuration like software.
Version control, canaries and rollback for the config layer that can take down everything at once.
Geo versus latency versus load: how steering decisions get made.
The decision inputs inside DNS steering platforms, and why geographic proximity keeps losing to measurement.
Cache hit ratio: the metric that predicts your bill.
One number that is simultaneously a performance and a finance report.
Bunny, CDN77 and KeyCDN: when value networks are right.
The segment below the enterprise tier, reviewed without snobbery.
Cache warming: prefilling the edge before the traffic arrives.
Product launches, sales events and failovers all start with cold caches. Warming strategies that work, and the ones that backfire.
DNS TTL strategy: the timer that gates your failover.
Resolver reality versus configured TTLs, CNAME chain costs, and choosing timers per record class.
How resellers get better rates than you do.
Channel economics, explained without the mystique.
WebSockets and gRPC through a CDN.
Long-lived and binary protocols meet infrastructure built for request-response: what works, what breaks, what to demand.
HTTP/3 and QUIC in practice.
Measured gains, honest caveats, and who benefits most.
What CDN buyers should budget for in 2027.
The December read on next year’s line items.
How to read a CDN invoice like an advisor.
Effective rates, commitment gaps, request fees and the one date that decides your leverage.
NS1, Route 53 and Cloudflare DNS compared.
Managed DNS is the control plane of multi-CDN. Choose it like one.
Multiplexing and prioritization: getting streams in the right order.
One connection, many streams, finite bandwidth: how priorities work now and where they still break.
Akamai, Fastly and Cloudflare: the enterprise three.
Three philosophies of the edge, compared on workloads rather than slogans.
Security headers, enforced at the edge.
HSTS, CSP, frame controls: the response headers that are policy, and why the edge is where they belong.
The CDN renewal playbook.
How prepared buyers routinely take 30% off at renewal without switching providers.
Switching CDN providers without downtime.
A 30-day migration plan that removes the fear from moving.
What a CDN should cost in 2026.
Real per-GB economics by volume and workload, and why nobody should pay the list rate.
Brotli, Zstandard and compression at the edge.
Ratios, CPU budgets, dictionary tricks and the config that quietly ships uncompressed bytes.
TLS 1.3 at the edge: handshakes, resumption, 0-RTT.
Where the milliseconds went, how session resumption works now, and the replay caveat on 0-RTT.
Cache-Control: the directives that actually matter.
max-age, s-maxage, stale-while-revalidate and friends: what each directive really instructs, and the combinations that misfire.
How to choose a CDN in 2026.
Seven questions that decide it, none of which is who has the most POPs.
Anycast mechanics: BGP as a load balancer.
How one IP answers from a hundred cities, what decides where you land, and how it fails.
Multi-CDN in 2026: the honest guide.
Architecture, steering and the trade-offs the pitch decks skip.
Core Web Vitals and your CDN.
Which milliseconds Google actually grades, and which the CDN controls.
When a standard plan is the right answer.
The honest case against overbuying, from people who sell the bigger thing.
Origin shield architecture: the second layer that saves you.
Collapsing thousands of edges into one origin-facing cache, and the design choices inside it.
Per-request pricing: when Fastly’s model wins.
Regional rates plus request fees make sense for some workloads and mislead others.
5xx at the edge: an error taxonomy for fast triage.
Whose 503 is it anyway: decoding delivery-layer errors and routing incidents to the right owner in minutes.
The modern image pipeline: AVIF, WebP and edge negotiation.
Format ladders, quality budgets and the delivery plumbing that gets the right bytes to the right screen.
The state of CDN pricing 2026.
Our annual read on where delivery rates actually cleared this year.
Fastly versus CloudFront.
Developer edge against AWS gravity.
Web fonts: delivering type without the flash.
WOFF2, subsetting, font-display and preload: ending the invisible-text era one header at a time.
Bot management across the big three.
How Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly sort good crawlers from bad.
Reading waterfalls: a TTFB debugging method.
From symptom to layer in six timing segments: a repeatable diagnosis for slow first bytes.
Range requests: how video seeks and downloads resume.
Byte ranges are the quiet workhorse of media delivery. Here is how caches handle them, and where they go wrong.
Akamai versus CDNetworks, measured.
Enterprise heritage against Asia strength, and where each rate card wins.
Request coalescing and the thundering herd.
What happens in the milliseconds after a hot object expires, and the machinery that keeps it boring.
What the big outages taught multi-CDN buyers.
Every major CDN incident is a free failover test. Here is what they keep proving.
CDN trials: what to measure in 14 days.
A trial is an experiment. Treat it like one.
Real user monitoring versus synthetic tests.
Why lab scores mislead CDN decisions, and what to trust instead.
Unifying logs across CDNs: one truth from many edges.
Field mapping, delivery lag, sampling honesty: building the observability layer multi-CDN actually requires.
Video CDN pricing, explained properly.
Cost per viewer-hour is the only number that matters. Here is the math.
The VCL mental model: thinking in request states.
Varnish’s configuration language shaped how a generation reasons about caching. The state machine is the curriculum.
Single CDN, multi-CDN, or renegotiate?.
The four questions that settle the debate: downtime cost, geography, performance versus price, and team capacity.
A DDoS taxonomy: reading attacks by layer.
Volumetric floods, state exhaustion and application-layer siege: what each looks like, and which defense actually answers it.
QUIC internals for delivery operators.
Streams, connection IDs, loss recovery and migration: what actually changed under HTTP/3.
TTFB: what first byte time tells you.
The most quoted latency metric, what it reveals, and what it hides.
DNS steering versus client-side switching.
How multi-CDN routing actually decides, and which decider fits you.
Bot fingerprinting: TLS signatures and behavioral signals.
JA3-style hashes, header forensics and behavior models: how edges classify automation, and the arms race underneath.
What DDoS protection should cost.
Mitigation pricing at each scale, and where the padding hides.
Cache poisoning: how caches get tricked into serving attacks.
Unkeyed inputs, header smuggling and the defenses that keep your cache from becoming the attacker’s CDN.
Locking the back door: mTLS and origin protection.
Your edge is hardened; is your origin still on the public internet answering strangers? Closing the bypass properly.
IPv6 and Happy Eyeballs in content delivery.
Dual-stack reality: what v6 changes for latency, what it breaks when half-configured, and how clients race the two.
BBR and congestion control: why CDN throughput differs.
Loss-based versus model-based congestion control, and why the algorithm your CDN runs shapes your users’ throughput.
The true cost of free CDN tiers.
What free plans actually trade, and when the trade is fine.
Testing your WAF like you mean it.
Beyond the deployment checkbox: measuring what your rules actually catch, pass and break.
Egress fees: the cloud bill your CDN controls.
Every request your CDN serves is a request your cloud does not bill for.
Committed-volume tiers, explained.
How tier pricing really works, and when committing more genuinely costs less.
Fastly review 2026.
Where instant configuration earns its premium.
The security renewal trap.
Auto-renews, mitigation clauses and the overage exposure in your contract.
Third-party tags: the performance you outsourced.
Analytics, ads, widgets: measuring the tax, containing the blast radius, and governing the creep.
Why default WAF rulesets fail twice.
Blocking customers and missing attacks at the same time.
Delivering single-page apps: shells, chunks and the cache seam.
Fingerprinted bundles, HTML that must not cache long, and the deploy-time race that 404s your users.
Do you actually need multi-CDN?.
The thresholds that justify it, and the polite ways to say not yet.
CDNetworks review 2026.
The honest independent assessment of Asia’s strongest delivery network.
stale-while-revalidate, mechanically.
The directive that removes revalidation latency: how it executes inside a CDN, and where its guarantees end.
What CDNs can and cannot speed up.
Dynamic acceleration explained without the mysticism.
Overage clauses, minimums and true-ups.
The contract terms that quietly decide what you actually pay.
Crawl budget and delivery: SEO’s infrastructure layer.
How bots experience your CDN, why 5xx and slowness shrink your index, and the delivery settings that are secretly SEO settings.
The 25-provider landscape in 2026.
Who actually competes for what, from hyperscale to specialist.
CORS at the edge: killing the preflight tax.
Why OPTIONS requests stalk your APIs, how to cache them properly, and the config that makes them vanish.
Signed URLs and token authentication at the edge.
Protecting content without an origin round trip: schemes, expiry design and the revocation trade.
HLS vs DASH in 2026: the format war that ended in CMAF.
Two manifests, one segment format, and the packaging decisions that still matter.
Consistent hashing inside CDN clusters.
How a POP decides which server owns an object, and why nodes joining or leaving barely moves the cache.
Capacity planning for your biggest night.
Live events reward preparation with anticlimax. That is the goal.
Low-latency HLS: partial segments and the new delivery contract.
How LL-HLS gets under five seconds, and what it demands from your CDN.
The RFP questions that separate vendors.
What to ask before the demo steers the conversation.
Cache fragmentation: multi-CDN’s quiet cost.
The trade-off the pitch decks skip, and how to contain it.
Multi-region origins behind one edge: failover done right.
Health checks, failover semantics and the split-brain traps when your origin is plural.
Multi-CDN as commercial leverage.
The renewal math of having a second provider on the bench.
Edge composition: ESI and its modern descendants.
Assembling pages from cacheable fragments at the edge: the old standard, the new runtimes, and when composition pays.
CDN list price versus street price.
Why the rate card is an opening position, and what buyers actually pay.
Akamai review 2026.
What the largest network is worth, and what it is not.
Edge computing for buyers.
What is real, what is roadmap, and what it costs.
ETags and conditional requests, done right.
304s are the cheapest responses you will ever serve, if your validators actually validate.
What a millisecond is worth: the evidence, honestly read.
The famous latency-revenue studies, what they actually measured, and how to price milliseconds for your own product.
Image delivery in 2026.
Formats, edge optimization, and what the bytes are worth.
Vary, cache keys, and the art of not fragmenting.
The header that multiplies your cache into shards, and how to keep the shards countable.
Rate limiting at the edge: algorithms and honesty.
Token buckets, sliding windows and the distributed-counting problem underneath every limit you set.
Caching APIs, including the GraphQL problem.
REST responses cache beautifully; POST-shaped query languages do not. The techniques that close the gap.
The CDN security buying guide.
WAF, DDoS and bot management without the security premium.
Connection coalescing: fewer handshakes than you think.
How HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 reuse one connection across hostnames, and the certificate details that make or break it.
Purge strategies: invalidation without incidents.
Hard purge, soft purge, tags and versioning: choosing the right forgetting mechanism per content class.
Certificate chains, OCSP and the milliseconds they cost.
The TLS payload nobody optimizes: chain size, revocation checking, and stapling done properly.
CDN delivery in mainland China, honestly.
ICP filings, in-country POPs and what the real costs look like.