Buyer's Guide Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Apr 23, 2025 4 min read

Buying CDN

Buyer's guide.

Evaluation criteria

Edge presence: PoP count and geographic coverage. Match to your customer geography.

Performance: TTFB and tail latency from key customer regions. Run benchmarks before committing.

Pricing model: per-GB egress, per-request, or flat-rate. At your volume, which is cheaper?

Cloudflare. Strong globally; security features bundled (WAF, DDoS, bot management). Predictable pricing.

Akamai. Long-established; enterprise feature set. Higher cost; richer customisation.

AWS CloudFront. Tight AWS integration; per-region pricing. Best for AWS-heavy stacks.

Fastly. Edge-compute oriented; engineering-friendly. Strong for teams that want to run logic at the edge.

Origin egress: traffic from origin to CDN. Some CDNs include this; some bill it.

WAF and security add-ons: often separate line items. Bundle pricing matters.

Egress to other clouds: cross-cloud CDN egress can be expensive.

Real user monitoring (RUM) data. Synthetic tests miss real-world variability.

Test from key customer geographies. A CDN strong in North America may be weak in Asia or vice versa.

Cache hit rate matters more than raw edge speed. The fastest CDN is meaningless if your cache hit rate is low.

AWS-heavy stack: CloudFront. Integration savings outweigh feature gaps.

Multi-cloud or security-focused: Cloudflare. Bundled features; multi-region by default.

Enterprise with custom needs: Akamai. Cost is real; capability matches.

Edge compute focus: Fastly. The platform is designed for it.