Finding and implementing the right CDN solution can be a daunting task. But when you do, it will help you enhance global performance & minimize the risk for website outages with 100%.
World-class CDN providers like Akamai, Cloudflare, Cloudfront, etc. do an incredible job in terms of content delivery, but all have their possible shortcomings. Learn how Mlytics Multi CDN solution can be the right supplement for your CDN solution.
One platform, multiple CDNs
With the constantly increasing number of web-users, e-businesses and online content, there is an ever-growing demand for fast, high quality content delivery. To cater to the needs of hungry web-users, a plethora of top-class CDN solution providers like Akamai, Cloudflare and Imperva have entered the market. Each of these CDN vendors has its own strengths, price structure and implementation strategy.
While it’s always nice to have a large selection, the downside is that due to the variety of solution providers available, many clients spend quite a bit of time and effort shopping around and engaging with CDN vendors they deem suitable.
Additionally, after a while clients may find that the current solution does not entirely cover their needs. They may experience performance or management issues, while not able to ‘pull out’ of a long-term contract.
The Mlytics Multi CDN solution offers an easy-to-implement solution that combines the strengths of multiple top-tier CDNs to circumvent the possible shortcomings of single CDN solutions. Also, the lengthy process of shopping around for the right CDN is hereby significantly shortened as clients can select more than one solution provider.
Try before you buy : testing CDN performance
When shopping around for the right CDN solution, you naturally want the best, most reliable option out there. I mean… you’d have to be a bit crazy if you didn’t.
That said, analyzing CDN performance before actually committing to a certain solution provider is a pretty challenging task. Most CDN vendors can only share general performance data of their own CDN network. Often, they cannot show the actual performance for your particular website in real life, unless you commit to their service. Hence, oftentimes when shopping for a suitable CDN, you only have access to a small piece of the information pie.
In this ecosystem, each CDN-shopper needs to spend a significant amount of time and effort researching each individual CDN. In addition, you can almost never get a complete picture of the situation and make a truly informed decision. Therefore, the possibility of you spending plenty of valuable time and making the wrong decisions is not unlikely.
We understand that businesses deserve to make more informed purchase decisions, and they therefore need more performance data for each CDN. That is why Mlytics developed Pulse, an easy tool that provides CDN-to-CDN comparison in terms of latency and availability. It enables businesses to overcome their limited ability to test CDNs.
Truly global content delivery, including China
The speed of content delivery and the quality of user experience depends heavily on the proximity of a CDN provider’s PoPs to its web-users. Hence, to provide full global coverage, a CDN provider needs to have a significant amount of edge servers strategically distributed around the globe.
Truth to be told, at this point there is not a single CDN provider that can guarantee an equally well-performing and reliable experience in every corner of the world. Sure, top-tier providers like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, etc. perform incredibly well in a large part of the world, but there will always be ’blind spots’, depending on the strengths of each provider.
One of the biggest blind spots is ‘China’. With more than 800 million internet users, the Chinese market is a market you don’t want to miss out on. However, due to the internet infrastructure, it can get challenging to deliver a top-nodge web-experience to users in China.
Providers like Cloudflare and Akamai have incredible coverage in countries outside of China. This brings great results in terms of performance throughout the largest part of the world. But when it comes to content delivery in China, they work closely with local partners, possibly influencing performance. China CDN providers like ChinaCache and Tencent Cloud have plenty of experience with content delivery in China. However, they don’t have the same level of coverage as other providers for content delivery in countries outside of China.
Mlytics China Solution at work
Mlytics offers 2 solutions for enhanced website performance and content delivery in China :
Zero ICP License Solution
We’ve partnered with first-class near-China CDN providers with PoPs located in countries in the vicinity of China to make your website work in China without having to acquire an ICP license. Near-China CDN providers like Alibaba Cloud Global, Baishan Cloud, ChinaCache, Tencent Near-China, etc. are included in a Multi CDN solution which automatically selects the best performing CDN via Smart Load Balancing to guarantee the best possible user experience.
If you already have an ICP License, via the Mlytics platform you can access multiple trusted China CDNs and let our Smart Load Balancing do the heavy lifting. This automated solution performs CDN optimization down to city-level in China, offering a more precise website experience tuning process.
As a result, if you work with only 1 CDN provider, you have to compromise. Possibly you’ll miss out on traffic from particular regions, and therefore on revenue opportunities. For example, not being able to leverage the Chinese market is a huge opportunity cost.
Mlytics takes the pain out of sifting through countless CDN solutions to find a truly reliable global solution. The Mlytics Multi CDN platform incorporates multiple CDNs (including China CDNs) to let you leverage the power of the world’s best CDNs through an intuitive service.
Outage and availability risk management
Okay, the internet and most CDN solutions are pretty reliable and should not keep you from sleeping at night. But, we all know that outages do happen. And when they hit your business, they have catastrophic consequences for your revenue, reputation and overall brand.
All first-class CDN solution providers are doing whatever it takes to deliver the best possible performance and reliability. 99% of the time, everything works flawlessly too thanks to their impressive network of PoP servers around the globe. That said, at this point none of these vendors can promise 100% website uptime or availability.
Sooner or later, every e-business will have to deal with outages or availability issues, even the largest ones. And when this happens, this may have costly consequences. For example, in the summer of 2020, the CDN giant Cloudflare experienced an outage of 27 minutes. This unfortunate event directly affected e-businesses around the world.
Hence, a steady cloud redundancy and disaster recovery plan to prevent any event from taking down your service is essential. At Mlytics we tackle this type of event with our Smart Load Balancing solution. In the case of last year’s Cloudflare outage, our Smart Load Balancing service swapped out Cloudflare with the next best-performing CDN (different for different geographical locations) for requests. With this solution in place, we can truly guarantee 100% uptime for our clients websites.
Mlytics Smart Load Balancing at work
As can be seen from the screenshots below, Akamai experienced availability issues in Hong Kong between 6:00PM March 9th and 1:00AM March 10th (only 75.07% availability at the lowest point). Hence, to ensure the best possible availability, our Smart Load Balancing solution automatically switched to the best-performing CDN, which in this case was Fastly.
Takeaways
Implementing a CDN strategy is key if you run an e-business with global presence and wish to provide an equally excellent service to all your web-users around the world.
Top-tier CDN providers like Imperva, Cloudflare, Akamai, etc. are doing an incredible job in terms of content delivery and website performance enhancement. Each of these providers has its proper strengths and in 99% of the cases their solutions are waterproof.
However, when it comes to truly global content delivery and preventing website downtime, a combination of multiple top-tier CDNs would be an even more solid strategy. This is where Multi CDN solution providers like Mlytics come into play.
The Mlytics Multi CDN system collects latency and availability data from top-tier CDN providers around the world and autonomously routes traffic to the best-performing CDN via AI to deliver the best possible customer experience for one’s domain and bringing the risk of outages to a minimum.
