CDN based security and acceleration services are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for many website operators, private website owners and SMB business website admins. Such services are mostly chosen for their simple and quick integration and for their ability to provide cost-effective solutions to a wide range of website delivery challenges – helping improve load speeds, minimizing bandwidth consumption and significantly improving website security.

How to choose a CDN provider?

There are a lot of comparative reviews of CDN service providers. Better yet, you can always simply test these services yourself, as most CDN providers will offer some excellent free plans and trial options.

To help get you started, I have included here a review of the most prominent free CDN service providers: Incapsula, CloudFlare and jsDelivr.

Incapsula

Incapsula provides business oriented CDN solutions with strong security features, including anti-DDoS services and PCI DSS compliant WAF. The service is often picked for its security related benefits and is most suitable for business websites; e-shops, company websites, profit driven blogs and forums, etc.

Over its four years of activity Incapsula has generated an impressive array of clients, including well-known brands like Sony and Control-Scan.

Incapsula’s main benefits include:

• Dynamic caching algorithms
• Enterprise-grade PCI compliant WAF
• Backdoor Shell protection
• Full SSL support
• Non-disruptive DDoS mitigation
• Global network of high-powered servers (13 POPs)

Setup Process: Changes in your DNS records

Website: http://www.incapsula.com

CloudFlare

Chances are that Cloudflare is a name you’ve already heard of. The “godfather” of all free CDN, Cloudflare gathered quite a following and is a platform of choice for thousands of personal websites – still being extremely popular among bloggers and shared hosting providers.
Cloudflare is often suggested for its acceleration services, strong free plan features and no-overages policy. The company also offers several paid plans and its list of clients includes several big-names, like Luxurylink, Wikileaks and Metallica.

Cloudflare’s main benefits include:

• Railgun acceleration technology
• Low-cost DDoS mitigation
• Full SSL support
• Global network of high-powered servers (22 POPs)
• DNS management services

Setup Process: Takes over your DNS management.

Website: http://www.cloudflare.com

jsDelivr

jsDelivr offers specialized CDN services for JavaScript content. Although still relatively new, jsDelivr is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for many website developers, publishers and even bloggers who use its CDN services to host their JS files and projects. Some of the sponsors of this company are Cedexis, UserVoice and MaxCDN. Today, jsDelivr is already hosting around twenty times the files hosted by Microsoft and Google.

jsDelivr’s main benefits include:

• Specialization in JS delivery
• Global network of high-powered servers (13 POPs)
• Strong support of high-profile sponsors
• Full SSL support
• Great for specific JS related tasks

Setup Process: Integration Plugin

Website: http://www.jsdelivr.com

More about Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content delivery network, also known as content distribution network, is a term that denotes a collection of distributed servers that help transmit various types of web content to an end user. This transmission is based on the source of the content, the transmission path and the proximity to its end destination.

Must Read: Common Security Risks With Cloud Computing

Simply put, the Global spread of such networks helps get the content physically closer to the end user, diminishing delivery time to improve the end-user experience. At the same time, CDN also provides caching capabilities, which minimize bandwidth usage by delivering cached content from the CDN itself, instead of the original server.

Modern day CDNs push the envelope even further. Such CDN use the reverse proxy mechanism to provide their clients with an additional layer of security, using intelligent methods of real-time traffic profiling, which block spammers, isolate scrapers and hackers and even mitigate DDoS attacks, before they can reach your servers.

Most sought-after CDN benefits include:

• Accelerated delivery
• Optimized caching
• Website security
• Protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
• Better search engine optimization (SEO)