AKAMAI Description

One of the older, and most well-known CDN providers is Akamai Technologies. Founded in 1998, the company has served notable customers such as Twitter, Adobe, Facebook, Nintendo, Sky and Fox, BBC and CNN, and Bing.

Accounting for a large portion of the world’s Web traffic, Akamai’s Intelligent Cloud Computing Platform is built on top of 200,000 servers, in over 110 countries, within more than 1,400 networks in the world.

In the CDN industry, Akamai Technologies is a large player. The company holds a variety of CDN related patents, and is no stranger to patent infringement disputes. In 2005 Akamai Technologies acquired competitor Speedera, a move that ended a long-lasting dispute over Speedera-held patents. Additionally, Akamai has been in a dispute with Limelight Networks since 2006 over an alleged patent infringement - a case that came to an end in August 2015, with Limelight being held liable for the infringement.

Through the Google Cloud Platform CDN Interconnect program, Akamai has established a peering arrangement with Google’s Cloud Platform. Joined by Highwinds, CloudFlare, Fastly, Level3 and EdgeCast, Akamai has established private interconnects with Google edge locations, to the benefit of both parties customers. Compared to data traffic routing over the public Internet, traffic via the interconnects suffers less latency, and the connection is more reliable. Google Cloud platform who use GCE as their origin receive a discount to their egress origin traffic routed via Akamai.

AKAMAI Resellers

Akamai has an extensive reseller program and works with a large amount of partners to resell its services. One of those parties is Warpcache.

Interested in learning more about the company, Akamai services and Akamai pricing? Contact Warpcache here.

CLOUDFLARE Description

Not to be confused with Amazon Cloudfront, CloudFlare is a San Francisco-based CDN provider founded in 2009.

The company offers a Free plan, which includes a CloudFlare issued SSL certificate. The features included in the Free plan are basic; more become available to Pro, Business and Enterprise customers.

CloudFlare, together with Akamai, Fastly, Highwinds, Level3 and EdgeCast, is part of the Google Cloud Platform CDN Interconnect program. As part of the collaboration, 30 CloudFlare points-of-presence (PoPs) are directly connected to the Google Cloud infrastructure. When a content request comes in from a Google Cloud origin it will route directly through the interconnect between both parties rather than through the public Internet. As a result, latency is reduced for origin requests. Clients using Google Cloud also receive a discount to their egress traffic.

CloudFlare serves, and has served notable brands such as Reddit, Ello, Cisco, Zendesk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, OkCupid and eHarmony.