I've been looking for a new CDN for quite some time. Cloudflare seems like the obvious choice (and it's free) but still, something faster never hurts, as long as it doesn't burn a hole in the wallet.
Here is a comparison - admittedly naive - comparison of the raw latency of CDN networks. Tests are conducted using RIPE's Atlas monitoring platform using the same sets of nodes for all CDNs. The target of the latency test is the home URL for each respective CDN. Only IPv4 is measured for this test (surely all CDNs supports IPv6 in the year 2024?).
There are 2 discrete types of CDN networks. Anycast networks, and networks relying on DNS steering. To ensure fairness, all domains are resolved on the probe, and the same set of 999 probes are used for all pings.
| CDN | Avg Ping(ms) | Type | Measurement ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 13.576 | Anycast | 82164525 |
| Fastly | 18.602 | Anycast | 82164577 |
| Akamai | 18.337 | DNS | 82164717 |
| Cloudfront | 18.669 | Anycast | 82164735 |
| Bunny | 20.934 | DNS | 82164749 |
| CacheFly | 26.316 | Anycast | 82164777 |
| EdgIO | 33.119 | Anycast | 82164882 |
| 19.968* | DNS | 82164888 | |
| Tencent | 28.999 | DNS+Anycast | 82174581 |
| Alibaba | 35.012 | DNS | 82174695 |
* Google is blocked in China, in which probe nodes have notoriously horrible routing. In this case, it should be considered that 19.968 is in optimal conditions without the ping in Chinese nodes affecting the result
Results are in no particular order
To ensure transparency, you may view the results of this test through the Measurement ID by clicking on it.
For the meanwhile, there is only one clear winner, and I'm going to stick with Cloudflare.