Content delivery networks, sometimes abbreviated to CDN’s, are services that have a distribution of servers across the world. They store cached copies of your website across all of their worldwide data centres to greatly reduce the response times from your website. This also reduces the bandwidth used in your hosting plan.
By utilising a Content delivery network, you can considerably reduce the time it takes for your web pages to load. This will improve the user experience of your visitors. Search engines such as Google also factor the speed of a website into their ranking algorithms, therefore you should receive more traffic from search engines if your page loading time is reduced.
Content delivery networks can also stop your website from going down when you experience a traffic spike. While many hosting plans cannot cope with a sudden rush of traffic, CDN’s are designed to cope with the level of traffic that the front page of Reddit can bring.
Below is a list of popular content delivery networks:
 | Amazon CloudfrontAmazon offer a reliable content delivery network that is used by many large companies around the world. They have servers in 51 locations around the world including the USA, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They do not require you to sign up to any monthly plan to use them. Instead, they use a pay as you go system. The first ten terabyte costs around 12 cents per GB, though prices change slightly on where the traffic is coming from. Prices get cheaper and cheaper as your bandwidth requirements increase. |
 | CDN77CDN77 are a content delivery network that was launched in 2012. They boast thirty-one data centres across twenty-five countries and five continents. They have three data centres in South America, which is an area of the world where most CDNs only have one data centre. All of their data centres use solid state drives for storage to ensure fast delivery of content. Prices start from $49 per terabyte in North America and Canada, $125 per terabyte in Asia and Australia, and $185 per terabyte in South America. |
 | KeyCDNKeyCDN is a popular delivery network which has data centres across the globe. Rise Forums regular Brian Jackson works with the company and has published many useful tutorials showing you how you can use KeyCDN to improve the performance of your website. Their rates start at only $0.04 per GB for the first 10TB. That makes them one of the most affordable content delivery networks online. |
 | MaxCDNMaxCDN is probably the most well known content delivery network online. They have servers in over 90 countries worldwide; including the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of their servers use solid state drives to ensure fast downloads and they support tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. This helps them provide a response time of only 39 milliseconds in most locations Their basic plan retails at only $9 per month for 100GB of bandwidth. Their 500GB package costs $39 per month. Additional bandwidth can be purchased for around 8 cents per GB. Tutorial: How to Setup MaxCDN in WordPress with W3 Total Cache |