Website speed is one of the factors that contribute to a better user experience. Better user experience leads to higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, and more.
The use of a CDN is one factor in speeding up your WordPress website. It keeps a copy of website files on a huge network of edge servers located all over the world. When a user visits your website, the CDN serves the content from its nearest edge server rather than the main server. This leads to faster file downloads and, as a result, a better user experience.
In this article, we’ll look at the best pay as you go CDN services to help us not only speed up your website but also save money.
Best Pay as You Go CDN Services to Speed Up WordPress
CDN service can be expensive, but you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on it every month. There are numerous pay-as-you-go CDN services that allow you to pay only for the amount of bandwidth used by your website.
Some CDN services offer direct integration with WordPress which makes it easy for beginners to set up the service using a plugin. If you use a caching plugin like WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache, you can also use it to enable CDN on your website.
Below are some of the CDN services that use pay as you go subscription model.
1. Bunny.net
Bunny.net is one of the best CDN service provider in the market with data centers spread across the globe.
The Perma-Cache feature helps you replicate your website files (uncached files too) on the edge server to offer maximum performance.
You can connect to BunnyCDN servers using your existing caching plugin such as WP Rocket or use the BunnyCDN plugin.
Key Features:
- 71+ global datacenters
- Beginner friendly and easy to use dashboard
- NVMe + SSD Powered Servers
- Real-time monitoring to give you full insight into your traffic
- Instant purging with a click
- Free SSL with Let’s Encrypt
Pricing
Bunny.net offers two types of pay-as-you-go plans. You can add unlimited websites in one account but if your usage is less than $1 per month then BunnyCDN will charge you a minimum monthly charge of $1 per month.
Standard Network: Serve cache from 71 datacenters and is ideal for most websites with moderate traffic.
Volume Network: Serve files from 8 datacenters and is ideal for projects that store big files.
2. KeyCDN
KeyCDN is another good CDN service with great performance. It has a modern dashboard and integrates easily with CMS such as WordPress.
Most of the datacenters of KeyCDN are in Europe and you need to consider this if you have most of your website traffic from other regions.
Key Features:
- 40+ data centers in 30 countries
- 100% SSD storage to give that fast performance
- Easy to use management dashboard
- Free SSL with Let’s Encrypt
- Security protection such as DDoS Protection, block bad bots and access rules.
- Image Optimization
Pricing
The pricing starts as low as $0.04 per GB for the North America and Europe region. Other regions cost $0.09 per GB for Asia and Oceania and $0.11 per GB for Africa and Latin America. This pricing is applicable for the first 10TB of bandwidth per month and is further reduced if you have more traffic.
3. Rackspace
Rackspace is a popular cloud computing service provider that offers CDN service built on top of the powerful cloud infrastructure.
As it has more than 200 data centers around the world, the performance is fast and can quickly deliver website content to your visitors regardless of their location.
It is a bit technical to set up Rackspace compared to the first two pay-as-you-go CDN services.
Key Features:
- Powerful cloud infrastructure
- 200 datacenters around the globe
- Powered by the Akamai content delivery network
- Origin protection
Pricing
Rackspace pricing for CDN starts at $0.16 per GB.
4. Google Cloud CDN
Google Cloud CDN has distributed presence all over the world, 90 datacenters to be exact. It uses the strong global Google presence to deliver fast and reliable CDN service.
Setting up Google CDN, like Rackspace, can be difficult. Furthermore, they do not provide support. You will have to pay an additional fee to receive technical support.
Key Features:
- A truly global footprint with 90 datacenters spread across the world
- Free TLS (SSL) certificates
- $300 free credits to test the service for 90 days
- Integrated with Google Cloud
Pricing
For CDN, Google charge for bandwidth, HTTP/HTTPS requests, cache egress bandwidth, and cache misses.
5. Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon Cloudfront is a service provided by Amazon as part of its Amazon Web Services platform. Amazon Cloudfront provides one of the fastest CDN services due to its global footprint and advanced technology.
Beginners might find it complicated to set up the service. If you want to set it up on a WordPress website, they have a nice detailed article explaining the steps.
Key Features:
- A total of 275 edge server spread across 47 countries
- Powerful security options such as AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall, HTTPS, SSL/TLS
- Real-time analytics metrics and logging
Pricing
Free for 12 months with 50 GB of free data transfer. After that, you can pay as you go with pricing varying according to location.
Which Pay as You Go CDN Service Is Best for You?
After comparing all of the pay-as-you-go CDN providers listed above, I recommend Bunny.net. It is fast, has over 71 edge servers around the world, and allows you to easily connect to WordPress.
The pricing also starts very low and the minimum you have to pay is $1. I use it on all of my blogs and it’s proven to be a very cost-effective way to speed up the website.
The second service that I recommend is the KeyCDN and it is on par with BunnyCDN. The pricing is slightly higher, but you do get image optimization included in the plan.
The other services on this list are more difficult to set up and thus not suitable for beginners.
I hope this article helped you in selecting the best pay-as-you-go CDN service for your website. Please consider sharing the article on social media.
