Finding The Best CDN Service

By Juliette Cruz


A CDN service is designed to provide a strong backbone to your website. As your site grows in popularity, you will want to make sure that your visitors are never met with a site down message when they stop by. Whether you are rendering simple HTML or providing a streaming video service, network problems can cause a serious interruption if you are not prepared.

Many websites start by using a shared or dedicated hosting environment. While this may be fine when you first begin, you will want to move towards a much more stable environment as your site grows. The distributed network provides more stability by reducing the load on a single server. Shared server environments are even more dangerous because neighbor sites can cause the server to crash, causing your site to suffer as well.

When you begin the evaluation of providers, you will want to begin with the bandwidth requirements for your own site. This is where the main price is determined with most providers. They nearly all provide packages that include different levels of bandwidth measured by gigabytes. Many will let you go over your allotment for additional cost. If this is a regular occurrence, you should upgrade to a higher service package.

The next step is determining the type of services you will require. All of the providers will provide HTTP or HTML delivery. If you need streaming video, photo gallery, or live streaming video services you will need to make sure they have the right hardware to optimize the performance. As your site grows, you will want to anticipate additional needs and plan to upgrade your services.

Twenty-four hour support will be necessary for success. Most providers say they offer this level, but many of them simply have email support. Ask for a hotline and call it at different times to be sure they are appropriately staffed. If your site goes down when people are trying to access it, your reputation will be damaged if you are not able to contact support for a quick response.

The most important part of your research will include reputation research. You will want to find out how long they have been in business, the approximate number of customers they have, financial stability, and look for complaints from customers. Most of this can be found through simple web searches. With many companies growing, merging, and going out of business, you will not want to be stuck with a service that is having trouble keeping up.

The price should be the lowest denominator in the decision process. Though price is important when working with a budget, you want to measure the cost based on other factors as well. If you buy the cheapest service and have many problems, your bottom line will be affected. Two providers may have identical pricing plans for very different reasons. One may be providing below cost service to compete. Another may have a larger customer base which allows them to keep the prices low. Without doing background business and reputation checks on the various providers you may not be able to truly compare each one.

Your business often depends on other providers for success. While you want to be sure to contain your costs, you want to do so smartly. When you choose a CDN service provider, make sure you are getting the best for your money. Choose carefully and be prepared to grow your business.




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