Introduction KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a global content delivery network whose mission is to develop and engineer a content delivery solution that is accessible to as many people as possible. They work with various peering partners to keep the costs low which in turn allow them to provide very competitive prices.
They engineered their own architecture and the infrastructure is fully owned by KeyCDN. All POPs are located in premium SSAE 16-compliant data centers (such as Equinix, Softlayer, and Digital Realty), running on 100% SSD-optimized servers and Nginx for lower latency.
More Than Just a CDN
KeyCDN not only offers the lowest global price, but also more advanced features beyond an average CDN, such as HTTP/2 Support, Free SSL, Origin Shield, Secure Token, a RESTful API, and real-time analytics.
KeyCDN’s cheapest CDN plan is $4.00 per month. If you are undecided you should take advantage of their 30-day free trial.
Table of Contents
KeyCDN Features
In the world of Content Delivery Networks, it’s rare to find a service provider that offers quality CDN services at an affordable price. In most cases, you’ll either find a CDN that offers excellent performance at expensive charges or an average performer with affordable costs.
KeyCDN, however, is the exception.
It offers top-notch Content Delivery Network Packages at some of the best prices around. Therefore, whether you’re looking for excellence in performance or affordability in a content delivery network, KeyCDN fits the bill perfectly.
Why Does KeyCDN Stand Out From The Rest?
One of the areas where KeyCDN wins out over other CDNs is in the competitive pricing category, but there is more. So how does KeyCDN help you and your website achieve excellence?
- Extremely competitive value for performance
- Push and pull functionalities
- Widespread Points of Presence (POPs)
- Pay-as-you-go pricing
- Customized TCP stack
- Top encryption standards with two-factor authentication
- Free SSL
- 100% Solid State Drive Latency
- HTTP/2 for rapid delivery
This CDN offers the lowest prices globally that literally give you your money’s worth through a pay-as-you-go policy. Where other CDNs in the affordable price range stick you with packages with fixed prices and bandwidth restrictions, KeyCDN features a simple pricing plan of $0.04 for every 1GB of traffic.
Proportionate Pricing
So, if your website has a monthly bandwidth of 300GB, you’ll only pay $12/month. The same amount of bandwidth can cost you as much as double the price with other CDNs. For instance, MaxCDN, yet another popular option, charges $9 a month for 100GB, which means you’ll end up paying $27 a month for 300GB of bandwidth.
While affordability is a great benefit when it comes to buying goods/services, quality of products/services on offer is usually what attracts clients at the end of the day. With KeyCDN, you’ll be happy to know that despite the affordable prices, they offer top class services.
Like any quality content delivery network, this CDN offers you the option of selecting between pull and push functionality.
Pull Functionality
With the pull option, KeyCDN “pulls” static content from your servers, caches it, and then distributes it online from their edge serves at accelerated speeds. The push option, on the other hand, entails uploading the content of your website to KeyCDN where it will then be distributed globally from the company’s servers.
The full list of Pull functionality list published by KeyCDN includes the following 10 features:
- Instant purge zone caches
- Override origin cache-control headers
- Override origin expire headers
- Origin shield
- Canonical headers
- Custom robots.txt
- Cache query strings
- Strip cookies
- Custom HTTP request field
- Brotli compressed asset caching
Each option comes with its own set of features with the pull zone providing you with zero limits on file size, the ability to upload content to your FTP account, HLS and HTTP streaming support, a sync feature for syncing content, and directory listing and indexing features for keeping your stuff organized.
Push Functionality
The push zone’s features, in turn, enable you to purge certain files or an entire zone, override origin cache-control headers, prevent issues of duplicate content on your domains, plus so much more. Other quality features you get to enjoy with Key CDN include:
Widespread Points of Presence (POPs)
Aside from distributing the content of your website, CDNs also help make sure that your site loads fast by serving it to your visitors from a server that is closest to them.
KeyCDN has tons of these servers spread across America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. The servers deliver a high level of reliability and performance as they’re housed in high-class data centers powered by cutting-edge infrastructure owned by KeyCDN.
KeyCDN have a live view of all POPs. Screenshot via Digital.com
You can purchase as many POP’s as you wish to speed up the load times of your website among visitors in different states and continents.
Ad-Enabled Video Player
All KeyCDN accounts come with an ad-enabled video player that gives users the option of monetizing videos.
SEO Features
A cool feature of KeyCDN is that it helps you improve the ranking of your website among search engines. It does this through two key SEO features: canonical URLs and robots.txt.
The canonical URLs help you add an extra HTTP header to your zone, which lets search engine crawlers know that the content from the CDN is only a copy. As a result, you’ll not be penalized for duplicate content.
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines which files and folders on your website to avoid going through and indexing.
This feature helps in instances when you have two versions of a page on your site and want one kept away from search engine crawlers if you have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the whole world to see, or when you want to exclude images, stylesheets, or javascript from indexing.
KeyCDN’s boosting of your site’s load times in different areas of the world also helps improve your search engine ranking.
Setup and Ease of Use
CDNs offer the best way to speed up a website. However, a great number of webmasters avoid these vital services due to fear of having to deal with a complicated setup process.
KeyCDN, however, aims at making the setup process as easy as possible.
How to Set Up KeyCDN
The company offers a simple 3-step setup process that only requires you to:
- Choose a zone type
- Create your zone
- Integrate the CDN with your website
And as simple as this process is, KeyCDN goes a step further to outline every last detail of the setup process in its knowledge-base, which also includes integration guides for a variety of applications including the most popular CMSs.
Therefore, you’ll have an easy time setting up your CDN account even if you’re new to this form of service.
Dashboard Provisions
KeyCDN also provides users with the benefit of a great user experience through a simple dashboard that’s beautiful, responsive, fast, intuitive, and feature packed. The dashboard fits provisions for managing zones, API, viewing invoices, and managing FTP accounts, all on one page. This helps make managing various zones extremely simple even for newbies.
Additionally, the dashboard displays an overview of all ongoing activities where you can see real-time stats, logs, analytics, geolocation stats, and more.
Security with KeyCDN
With KeyCDN, you can secure your website however you like as the company offers lots of options as far as security standards are concerned. If you already have your own SSL certificate, KeyCDN integrates it to your CDN package at no extra cost.
Alternatively, if you don’t have this security feature, KeyCDN provides all of its users with a shared SSL for free. Additionally, KeyCDN offers Let’s Encrypt Integration, which basically allows you to have a custom SSL certificate for free.
Not Just Simple Security
For more security measures that go beyond encrypting the link between a web server and browsers, KeyCDN offers:
- Secure token links that enable you to secure vital website-related content by making it available only to a specified group of visitors. Secured links also allow you the flexibility of providing said content within a desired period ranging from seconds to days.
- A feature for blocking bad bots, which could be draining your credits. Thanks to this security feature, you get to save money on your CDN bandwidth.
- Two-factor authentication, login/change notifications, and account access rules (for restricting access to the account by IP address).
These three services help to enhance the security of your CDN account.
WordPress Integration and Caching
There are a number of ways in which KeyCDN integrates with WordPress using a series of plugins. KeyCDN uses three WordPress plugins – Optimus, CDN Enabler, and Cache Enabler – each with their own benefits for your business.
| Optimus | CDN Enabler | Cache Enabler | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plugin Function | Image optimization | Let’s you integrate a CDN to your WordPress site | Content caching |
| How It Helps You | Saves you plenty of storage space and decreases loading times | No developer needed for CDN integration | Makes your website faster |
Optimus is an image optimization tool designed to ensure that images load quickly on your website. CDN Enabler is a lightweight plugin that allows you to quickly integrate a CDN with your WordPress website.
Meanwhile, Cache Enabler is a caching plugin that caches static HTML files to the origin server to deliver website content to visitors faster.
Why Do Page Speeds Matter?
Page loading speeds are vital for your business’s website. After all, if customers have to wait longer for your website to load then they are likely to grow impatient and go to a rival website instead.
One tool which is useful for analyzing your website is Google Page Speed Insights. The application gives your website PageSpeed score and offers suggestions to make your website faster.
What is the Importance of Caching?
Caching stores website files selectively on a Content Delivery Network’s servers so that it can be quickly accessed by customers.
This is important for your business because it means that your website will load quicker than competitors and that customers will have easier access to your products and services.
KeyCDN Help and Support
When experiencing issues with KeyCDN that require assistance, you can request for help from the support team, which is available 24/7 through email, Skype, and telephone. All members of the support team are well trained and can answer any questions or resolve whatever issues you might be experiencing.
The best part of this CDN’s support system is that you don’t have to wait for long to have a query/issue addressed. Users have reported receiving feedback from support tickets in as little as 2 minutes.
Rarely Fast Support
This is quite remarkable as CDNs and other website-related service providers usually take several minutes or even hours to respond to support tickets.
There is also a community forum that you can participate in as well as find answers to your questions. KeyCDN also has a great knowledge base, which is updated on a regular basis. It features everything from how-to guides, to troubleshooting pointers, to technical questions that usually crop up from CDN users.
Pros and Cons
Is KeyCDN a good content delivery network?
Pros
Features the best CDN prices where you only pay for what you use.
Delivers a wide range of content including website data, podcasts, gaming packages, videos and more.
Allows the option of managing your CDN account from your mobile or tablet.
KeyCDN dashboard uploads updates in seconds.
Supports all the major CMSs out there ranging from Joomla to Drupal, to WordPress.
Allows you to create as many zones as you need.
Features real-time reporting tools that give you a picture of exactly what is happening with every passing second.
Upon signing up for KeyCDN, the company sends you an email with an activation link that takes you to an area with steps on how to configure your CDN zones.
The company’s dashboard is both easy to learn and use.
KeyCDN protects all websites from hotlink attacks thereby helping minimize bandwidth loss.
KeyCDN offers a free trial of their services whereby a potential customer is given free credits worth 25GB of traffic ($1.00) for three months. This free trial is a great offer as it allows you to try out KeyCDN’s services without making any commitments.
Cons
Hard to fault, the only possible downfall of KeyCDN is that your CDN package comes with a limit of 5 zones for free. An extra zone above the five limit is $1/month.
KeyCDN Plans & Prices
KeyCDN offers very competitive pricing. They charge an one flat-rate price for access to their entire content delivery network, however they do however charge for storage. For more information and latest and most up to date prices visit KeyCDN’s website.
| CDN Plan | Bandwidth/Traffic | Points of Presence | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan #1 | 100 GB | 25 | 4.00 |
| Plan #2 | 500 GB | 25 | 20.00 |
| Plan #3 | 1 TB | 25 | 40.00 |
| Plan #4 | 5 TB | 25 | 200.00 |
| Plan #5 | 10 TB | 25 | 400.00 |
About KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a privately funded, global content delivery network (non-federated) based out of Switzerland. It was founded by Jonas Krummenacher and Sven Baumgartner. KeyCDN’s mission is to develop and engineer a content delivery solution that is accessible to as many people as possible. It is a mission about speed, scalability, and reliability.
They work with various peering partners to keep the costs low which in turn allow them to provide very competitive prices. They engineered their own architecture and the infrastructure is fully owned by KeyCDN.
Some of KeyCDN’s customers include Uploadcare (a PAAS, providing file handling mechanisms for websites and mobile application) and Airsquare (An all-in-one website platform for businesses).
- Ruemikerstrasse 60, CH-8409, Winterthur, Switzerland
- 41 44 585 31 52
- Official website
- Founded by Jonas Krummenacher and Sven Baumgartner in 2012.
Best KeyCDN Alternatives
- MaxCDN Review
- CDN77 Review
- CacheFly Review
- CloudFlare Review
Summary
Whether it’s comparing prices, features, security, or performance among various CDNs, KeyCDN takes the win in almost every scenario. Therefore, regardless of what you’re looking for in a content delivery network, KeyCDN can easily cover all of your needs.
Plus their 30-day free trial period gives you full access and your money back if you aren’t satisfied.
Frequently Asked Questions About KeyCDN
Confused, alternatively looking for an instant answer to a common query? There’s a chance we have the answer here to save you time.