KeyCDN : A Low Cost CDN For WordPress End Users

Least Costly, Feature Rich CDN Which Can Compete With Akamai is KeyCDN. KeyCDN is a Low Cost CDN For WordPress End Users With Free Trial. We know very well that, Rackspace Cloud Files and HP Cloud CDN are other two great re-seller of great CDN with full support of OpenStack Object Storage. KeyCDN is not powered by OpenStack Object Storage but it is really great and at the time of writing this unbiased guide cum review, we are using KeyCDN.

KeyCDN : Where is the Catch of Low Cost CDN?

The user need to pay minimum $25 after the trial is over. Minimum payment of onetime fee $25.00 KeyCDN has affiliate system, normally if you signup, you will get $1.00 as credit for 1 months free usage as trial, but if you signup using links like this, you will get $5.00 credit. You can test it, testing will not harm.

As we are referring you are getting $5.00 but both you and we have to pay $25 one time fee after a month. This is not exactly friendly for a true “pay as you go” service. We would charged hardly $2.00/month, that is becoming $25pre-paid balance. Except Rackspace Cloud Files and HP Cloud CDN, all charges more badly. Except HP Cloud CDN (which is Akamai), none can beat the pricing. Understand it – KeyCDN is low priced, but they will collect that $25.00 beforehand.

KeyCDN : A Low Cost CDN For WordPress End Users

Except that $25.00 charge and less number of POP ( read datacenters for global distribution ), everything is the best about KeyCDN. KeyCDN gives free custom subdomain with shared SSL cert, which can be activated with HSTS, CORS, SPDY, Zonereferrers and max expires can be set to quite higher to encourage caching.

View full size screenshot by clicking here.

Features of KeyCDN

Apart from the above mentioned features, a great feature is 301 redirection from http URI to https URI. For example :

KeyCDN supports both origin pull and origin push. Akamai CDN via HP Cloud & Rackspace does not support origin pull. A push CDN works very much like a secondary server or a cloud storage service. A pull CDN demands the sysadmin to leave the static content on the server and only rewrite the URLs to point towards the CDN. When a GET request is sent for a specific file, the CDN will first go to the original server, then pull the file (that is why the name – origin pull) and serve it. Pull CDNs costs more for complicated technical setup. Normally, we do not need pull CDN but push CDN, with push CDN we can fine grain the static file’s URLs with low traffic. But a multiuser content generation site demands a pull CDN otherwise the real server will die out of extra works.

Original Akamai has pull CDN, but HP Cloud & Rackspace as reseller does not support. That Origin Pull is taken as “real CDN” to many sysadmins.

For medium websites with HSTS, you will use origin push. WordPress W3TC Plugin has excellent upload feature filtering by file types.

KeyCDN offers a user-friendly dashboard which is intended to control the aspects of account settings, general reporting, payment, real-time report, account usage, bandwidth usage, zone management, file browser, API etc. The interface is easy to understand and equivalent to very high cost CDN services. You are not going to get this kind of dashboard with Rackspace Cloud Files and HP Cloud CDN as Akamai’s reseller.

KeyCDN has great integration with WordPress W3TC Total Cache and WP Super Cache Plugin. They have great tutorials and guides on their own website. Support is excellent. File transfer is either using SFTP or Rsync. Most important, KeyCDN is basically Swiss Cloud. We talked before about data privacy associated with Swiss Cloud and lower pricing.