KeyCDN: Number 1 CDN? The best value for money?

Are you using a CDN on your website? Whether you are or not, you might look into KeyCDN. Suppose you run an internet business or an owner of a website. In that case, you might already know rule #1 of keeping the audience connected to your site. The rule is: Maintain the loading time as low as possible because low loading time is directly related to the positive user experience. This is where CDN comes into the picture.

What is a CDN?

A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of web servers that are distributed globally. The main aim of CDNs is to provide your site user the faster content delivery. These CDNs are considered the backbone of the internet in terms of the delivery of content.

CDNs were designed to solve latency, which is the annoying delay in the loading of content on your site. CDNs virtually shorten the physical distance between the origin server and the end-user, providing you better content loading time hence better site engagement.

Many CDN service providers claim to provide you the best CDN; however, their prices may put you off, especially if you are new to website business. The CDN provider that stands apart in terms of pricing and also the performance is KeyCDN.

What is KeyCDN?

KeyCDN is one of the global content delivery networks which are engineered to make CDN accessible to as many users as possible. Working with many peering partners, KeyCDN has kept its price as affordable as possible. The premium SSAE 16-compliant data centres locate all the POPs such as digital reality, Equinix, and soft players. To lower down the latency effectively, they run on Nginx and 100% SSD-optimised servers.

What makes KeyCDN the best CDN in terms of price and performance?

KeyCDN provides the best and advanced features at the lowest possible prices, unlike the other average CDNs. Some features that KeyCDN supports include:

• Origin shield
• Free SSL
• Secure token
• HTTP/2 support
• Restful API
• Real-time analytics
• DDoS mitigation
• Powerful control panel
• Push and Pull features
• Top encryption standard with two-factor authentication
• Solid-state drive latency
• Widespread POPs (points of presence)
• Customizable TCP stack

Pricing

In comparison with other CDN providers, KeyCDN has one of the best pricing structures. Currently, KeyCDN charges around $0.04 / GB in Europe and America, which is half the CloudFront price. Since there is no monthly cost attached to the KeyCDN, you are only required to pay for your usage. You can always pay the amount according to your use of data out and bandwidth.

The only problem you can encounter in regard to payments is KeyCDN works on a pre-credit basis only. This means that you have to have some credit in your account to use the uninterrupted services. The minimum credit you will have to purchase is $49, and the validity of this credit lasts around one year.

While this pre-credit of $49 is not a matter of concern for sites whose yearly expense is more than that. However, there is a risk of losing some of your credit if it is lower than $49. But the good news is KeyCDN allows the roll-over payment only if you add another amount before the end of the year but still means that you will have to end your credit in a year. So, it’s a good idea to subscribe to KeyCDN only if the monthly expenditure of credit is over $5.

Compared to Europe and North America, KeyCDN charges a bit more in Asia and South America. Hence, it’s always a good idea to check the official pricing page before subscribing to a service.

When it comes to prices, KeyCDN is the most affordable of all the CDN service providers. The performance may lack features than others but keeping the price in context, the performance is still impeccable. If you are new in site business with a limited budget, then KeyCDN can be your best choice to give your site a much-needed push at the most affordable price.

Performance

If you rank CDNs according to the performance they deliver, then KeyCDN may not top the list; however, if you rank them according to the price and performance balance, then KeyCDN will be top choice position.

Other CDN providers’ performance does not even have much of the difference, and some even vary by only a few milliseconds. The real-time difference is sometimes even negligible. KeyCDN lacks behind CloudFront in terms of performance only by 2–3 milliseconds. However, when compared to the pricing and features offered, KeyCDN does not charge for cache invalidation while CloudFront does. With other CDN providers, you might face an issue with setting up an SSL certificate. Simultaneously, with KeyCDN, the certification process is relatively easy and involves one-click integration only.

It can be easily said that there is very minimal difference in terms of response time in comparison to almost all CDNs and KeyCDN.

Content management systems (CMS) compatible with KeyCDN

One of the essential features of KeyCDN is that it works great with almost every type of CMS. No matter what CMS you use, KeyCDN is here to provide you the performance comparable to the expensive and popular CDN providers. Some of the most popular CMS in which KeyCDN can be enabled include:

While different website owners vouch for different CMS, their CDN provider choice remains the same, i.e., KeyCDN.

How does KeyCDN work with WordPress?

KeyCDN offers a very easy to use Plugin for WordPress to enable KeyCDN on your WordPress site. This CDN enabler is present in the WordPress repository, and the best part is that it’s free.
To set up the plugin, all you are required to do is enter the URL of CDN and the directories you wish to serve from the CDN zone.
With the CDN enabler plugin, you can easily integrate KeyCDN services taking the help of APIs. There is also an option of enabling the plugin directly from the WordPress dashboard.

KeyCDN VS MaxCDN

MaxCDN is the choice of many websites when it comes to high performance. However, since the advent of KeyCDN in the market, MaxCDN’s market value is challenged as more and more site owners prefer KeyCDN over MaxCDN. The reason lies in the affordable price offered by KeyCDN and other free features that either MaxCDN does not provide or offer at an additional cost. The features which give KeyCDN an edge over MaxCDN includes:

• KeyCDN offers free origin shield, secure token, and HTTP/2 support, while MaxCDN offers all three features but with an additional subscription price.
• The POPs of KeyCDN is more widespread. KeyCDN comprises 25 POPs, while MaxCDN has only 12.
• KeyCDN has Block bat bots and Brotli support, which MaxCDN does not offer.

How to get started with KeyCDN?

Getting started with CDN is as easy as it gets. All that you are required is a valid e-mail address and a strong password. You just need to confirm your account and get started.

Initially, you need to create a zone after logging in by clicking on the ‘zone’ present on the left navigation. Then you will have to choose from the options between LIVE, POD, Pull, Push. The most common choice is Pull, using which KeyCDN automatically loads and stores data from your website.

After that, you can click on the ‘show advanced features’ you will configure, for example, the SSL use. Lastly, you click on the ‘save,’ and if you’re working on WordPress, you’re almost done. Just open the plugin settings and navigate to the CDN tab. Click on the ‘enable CDN support option’ and enter your website URL in the dashboard under ‘zones,’ and you’re good to go.

Widespread points of presence (POPs)

KeyCDN has millions of serves all across Europe, Asia, America, and Oceania. These servers are designed to deliver high-quality performance and offer impeccable reliability because they are located in high-class data centres powered by top-notch infrastructure entirely owned by KeyCDN.

How KeyCDN helps improve website ranking?

KeyCDN offers two SEO features, i.e., robots.txt and canonical URLs. The canonical URLs can add an extra HTTP header to your zone, which in turn lets the search engine crawlers inform that the content from this CDN is only a copy, and then you won’t be penalized for the duplicate content. The robot.txt file tells the engine about the files and folders on your website to avoid going through and indexing.

Website security

As far as security standards are concerned, KeyCDN offers lots of features to secure your website entirely. Let’s say you have your own SSL certificate, then KeyCDN can integrate it into your CDN package without adding extra cost.

KeyCDN also comes with a free SSL feature; therefore, your website is secured even if you did not have your SSL. KeyCDN comes with the ‘Let’s Encrypt Integration’ feature, which allows you to have a free SSL certificate.

Conclusion

Though KeyCDN is a new player in the CDN market, it has swept many older and expensive CDN providers off their feet. The price is so low ($0.04/GB) that virtually you will have to pay only for traffic. KeyCDN package also offers some pro features that other CDN providers would provide at an extra cost. The 20 POPs are worldwide distributed, and more are being engineered to come. The implementation of this CDN service is straightforward, especially if WordPress powers your site. If you are still confused about investing in this CDN provider service, you can sign-up for a 25 GB traffic 30-day trial package without providing payment details.

With all features combined, it is safe to say that KeyCDN is the top CDN provider in affordability. Performance is also comparable to the expensive options in the market.

If you want to optimise your website even more, I’ve written 5 tools that can optimise your website.