In the world of CDNs Akamai is the incumbent 500 pound gorilla, no
question. They have a HUGE global presence, super solid technology and
networks, and have the most experience with large enterprise clients.
However, now there other strong players in the CDN market. One of the
most interesting is CloudFlare. They are a young company and have
strong security and front end optimization (FEO) focuses, beyond just
the normal CDN edge caching functionality. They started as a security
company, and in fact recently
absorbed the largest DDOS attack in history
without a disruption in service. In order for their security service to
not have a performance degradation associated with the overhead of
proxying and filtering all traffic, they had to develop advanced
performance improving functionality as part of their service. CDN-style
asset caching is part of it, but their FEO services make a big
difference.
CloudFlare is also VERY affordable! They manage this by the fact that
when they built their business, global data centers, cloud computing
providers, massive network infrastructure and bandwidth, were all
ubiquitous and cheap, so they had relatively small capital outlay to
build their service. Compare this to Akamai who had to invest massive
amounts of capital into building data centers, servers, laying fiber,
etc… The end result is that CloudFlare’s services are one to three
orders of magnitude more affordable than Akamai. CloudFlare also
includes their security and FEO services as part of their standard
service, whereas Akamai’s security and FEO offerings are a substantial
additional cost.
I recently used a moderate to heavy complexity Oracle Commerce
eCommerce site to do some quick and dirty comparison testing. The
results are interesting, but perhaps not unexpected. First off, this is
not a comprehensive comparison, and doesn’t factor in Akamai’s FEO
service, or their network locations vs CloudFlares, etc.. So don’t read
into this more than you should, and don’t remind me that it’s not 100%
apples to apples:)
First I tested the home page, which was image heavy and had large navigation, etc..
|
Site
|
YSlow Score
|
Pagespeed Score
|
Download Size
|
Load Time
|
Time to OnLoad
|
Number of Requests
|
|
Origin
|
69 (D)
|
74
|
1.1 MB
|
3.99 seconds
|
3.75 seconds
|
51
|
|
Akamai
|
73 (D)
|
79
|
1.2 MB
|
3.19 seconds
|
2.61 seconds
|
47
|
|
CloudFlare
|
94 (A)
|
85
|
0.7 MB
|
2.39 seconds
|
1.91 seconds
|
34
|
Then for a category page I got these results:
|
Site
|
YSlow Score
|
Pagespeed Score
|
Download Size
|
Load Time
|
Time to OnLoad
|
Number of Requests
|
|
Origin
|
68 (D)
|
71
|
1.2 MB
|
4.00 seconds
|
2.87 seconds
|
75
|
|
Akamai
|
73 (C)
|
76
|
1.1 MB
|
3.61 seconds
|
2.73 seconds
|
71
|
|
CloudFlare
|
93 (A)
|
82
|
0.4 MB
|
2.85 seconds
|
1.92 seconds
|
45
|
As you can see the difference is very impressive! Dramatically
improved YSlow and Pagespeed scores (which you would expect since
CloudFlare provides the FEO features as part of the main service). But
overall page load time was also much better, even with Akamai’s larger
network footprint. This is due to the significantly lower number of
requests and overall smaller size of assets. These two factors have huge
impact on the end user’s site performance. So even if you don’t look at
CloudFlare (and you should), you shouldn’t be using any CDN without FEO
features!
Disclaimer: My company is partners with CloudFlare and other
vendors
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Even we as a team in Yepme.com have been using Akamai and still find that we get low scoring in YSlow even after using their DSA, DSR etc. Also there image rendering services from edge servers is quite costly and leaves no scope for negotiation. The same applies to FEO in akamai.