What is MaxCDN?
MaxCDN is a reputable content delivery network that will speed up your website and reduce your server load. It offers an array of industry-leading features such as instant purge and provisioning, instant SSL, full API and GitHub integration and real-time reporting.
MaxCDN integrates easily with most content management systems, such as WordPress, provides easy and intuitive setup and user experience, plus loads more quality benefits all at an affordable price.
MaxCDN’s cheapest CDN plan is $20 per month. Get a free 15-day engineer-supported trial account today.
Pros and Cons of MaxCDN
Is MaxCDN a good content delivery network for your small or medium-sized business?
Pros
- Extremely fast site speeds if you are in areas served by their networks
- Offers PayPal as a payment option.
- Provides its clients with detailed, customizable real-time reporting.
- Has a user-friendly control panel.
- The company’s CDN plans are offered with a 30-day-money-back guarantee.
- Offers better crash resistance than its competitors.
- Offers fast, 24/7 customer support.
- Easily integrates with WordPress using a free plugin.
Cons
- With limited global networks, MaxCDN has a smaller global presence than many of its competitors.
- Fewer security options than competitors like CloudFlare, which focus more on security than speed.
MaxCDN speeds up your site, reduces your server load, integrates easily with most management systems, provides easy setup and user experience, and offers several quality benefits with almost zero drawbacks, all at an affordable price. This makes MaxCDN an excellent option for anyone with a website.
MaxCDN Features
It goes without saying that we all hate slow websites. What you may not realize, however, is just how impatient people are with slow websites. Conducted surveys show that web surfers expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds and will likely close a web page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
So, if you want your website to grab the interest of surfers long enough for you to get them to purchase something, you must at the very least be able to beat the expected 3-second load time. MaxCDN, one of the leading content delivery networks can help you with that.
Here is a compounded list of the useful features MaxCDN has to offer:
- Affordable plans for entry-level users
- Flexible SSL options
- Powerful U.S servers
- Domain sharding
- Ability to purchase extra storage
- Support for video files
- Website analytics
- Security reports
- Easy set-up
- Full encryption
Plans for the Masses
The great thing about MaxCDN is that it doesn’t discriminate and offers its services to everyone, ranging from one-man blogs to enterprise-level company websites. Therefore, you can be sure that you’ll find great solutions for your website at MaxCDN.
Whether it’s web hosting you’re looking for, alternatively a content delivery network provider, it is extremely rare to find a provider who caters for all customer types and business sizes.
Affordable Introductory Plan
One of MaxCDN’s main selling points is an introductory plan geared toward entry-level CDN users. The plan comes with a low price for the first terabyte of traffic and can be extended over a year if your data storage does not exceed the amount.
A pay-as-you-go company, MaxCDN allows you to customize the starter plan however you like at negotiable prices. For instance, you can secure your own SSL certificate or improve on the available API access.
Instant Speed Acceleration
When it comes to content delivery, the closer the content is to users, the faster the delivery. With MaxCDN, most of the company’s 12 servers are concentrated in North America. Therefore, if the targeted audience for your website is largely in the U.S, this CDN service would make an excellent fit for you.
The distribution of your content among the various U.S. servers will significantly improve the speed of your website. As a result, the browsing experience will be faster. This means little jitter, fewer network spikes, and an overall better streaming quality. This, in turn, will help to reduce bounce rate and trigger more page views, which will consequently result in higher search engine ranking.
Domain Sharding/Parallelizing Downloads Across Host Names
CDNs use multiple techniques to increase site speed, and domain sharding is another method MaxCDN uses. Domain sharding is a technique where data for a particular website is downloaded using multiple domains at the same time.
Web browsers often limit the number of downloads that a site can perform at one time, and domain sharding helps circumvent this restriction. For SMB owners, this means even faster site load time.
Storage
With storage requirements varying significantly from one website to another, MaxCDN ensures that all of its clients will be able to purchase enough disk space to meet their specific needs. Each data plan comes with a set amount of storage with the company allowing the purchase of extra storage for any client who requires more space.
Video Support
For websites that post videos frequently, MaxCDN offers a Video-On-Demand-Zone (VODZone) service.
This service basically makes it easy for website owners to upload videos to their sites and ensures fast and flawless streaming of videos. With this service, web surfers will, therefore, be able to view any available videos on your site without a hitch at the push of a button.
Analytics and Reports
MaxCDN Insights offers real-time analytics that can be as granular or as high level as you wish. View an executive summary or raw logs. These reports show you past behavior so you can predict future site needs. An API is also available so you can create custom solutions.
Dozens of Data Centers
MaxCDN currently has around 20 global edge locations in North America, South America, Western Europe, Australia, and Asia. Ten or more locations are currently in progress.
If the majority of your audience is in these areas, you are well covered.
Setup and Ease of Use
One of MaxCDN’s strengths is a simplified setup that results in instantaneous activation. In fact, MaxCDN is considered to be one of the easiest – if not the easiest – CDNs to setup. This is made possible by several factors.
- Firstly, the company has plugins for WordPress, Xcart, Social Engine, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, etc. Therefore, you’ll be able to use whichever management system you’re comfortable with.
- MaxCDN provides video tutorials and documents that explain the setup process in detail.
- The setup process itself is short and simple and will only take about 5 minutes to complete.
- Finally, there’s also the option of requesting help from customer service if you run into any difficulty when setting up the CDN. So, there’s absolutely no way you’ll be unable to successfully setup MaxCDN.
The user-friendliness of this CDN service provider does not stop with an easy setup experience but rather extends to MaxCDN’s interface. In addition to featuring an easy to navigate interface, MaxCDN supports a wide variety of API commands.
This coupled with the support for most of the various CMSs makes the service highly customizable. What’s more, once your account has been activated, MaxCDN provides you with a step-by-step guide to getting started.
Security
When it comes to ensuring the security of the information of your web visitors and sensitive web pages, MaxCDN doesn’t disappoint. The content delivery network is encrypted with a shared SSL certificate for all but its smallest starter plan.
Additional security features such as activity logs, the IP WhiteList, and proactive email notifications further improve the security of your website when using MaxCDN. The best part is that there’s no extra charge placed on any of these extra security features.
| Security Feature | Activity Logs | IP Whitelist | Email Notifications | Full Encryption |
| What Does It Do? | A chronological record trail of activity across the website, acting as audit logs. Useful for detecting suspicious activity as well as troubleshooting. | Ensures that your customers receive your emails – IP blacklisted emails end up unopened in spam boxes. | Security-related email notifications mean you stay up to date and are alerted about anything urgent that requires attention. | In layman terms, this is the safe departure and receipt of data without allowing the wrong set of eyes to see it. The encrypted information is only available for the person or machine to view who/what is intended to view it. |
The company also allows you the option of purchasing and providing your own SSL certificate. However, you’ll have to pay an extra setup cost to go with this option.
Help and Support
When gauging response times for any service-lending company, satisfactory results are placed at a response time of around 126 to 129 milliseconds. Any response times of below 125 milliseconds are regarded as extraordinary and the best at customer service delivery.
With that said, CDN reviewers place the response time of MaxCDN at roughly 115 milliseconds for both email and phone customer support contacts, making it an excellent option for the discerning customer.
Customer support is also free and available 24/7/365 through a ticketing system, live chat or by phone. Therefore, you can be sure that your issues will be taken care of in good time.
MaxCDN Plans & Prices
MaxCDN offers a range of pay-as-you-go or yearly pre-paid plans aimed at both starter sites and high-volume sites. All plans come with SSL support, security and caching options, instant purging, 24/7 support, and loads more. For more information and the latest and most up-to-date prices visit MaxCDN’s website.
| CDN Plan | Bandwidth/Traffic | Points of Presence | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter Plan #1 | 100 GB | 16 | 20.00 |
| Starter Plan #2 | 500 GB | 16 | 39.00 |
| Starter Plan #3 | 1 TB | 16 | 79.00 |
| Starter Plan #4 | 5 TB | 16 | 299.00 |
| High Volume Plan #1 | 10 TB | 16 | 499.00 |
| High Volume Plan #2 | 50 TB | 16 | 2560.00 |
| High Volume Plan #3 | 150 TB | 16 | 6144.00 |
| High Volume Plan #4 | 350 TB | 16 | 12,544.00 |
Best MaxCDN Alternatives
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About MaxCDN
Founded in 2009 by David Henzel, Chris Ueland, and Ben Neumann, MaxCDN is mostly a static file-serving content delivery network that’s dedicated to boosting website speeds to ensure visitors won’t have to wait long to get the content they need.axCDN’s vision and mission statement are to create the best CDN experience possible through interactions that are frictionless, instant and can happen anytime, anywhere, and on any device.The company is known for its many perks, which include a wide array of CDN services, fast response times, painless introductory process, and compatibility with all major Content Management Systems (CMS).
- 3575 Cahuenga Blvd. West Suite 330, Los Angeles, CA, 90068, United States
- 877 629 2361
- Official website
- Founded by David Henzel, Chris Ueland and Ben Neumann in 2009.
How Does MaxCDN Compare to CloudFlare and CloudFront? – FAQ
There are dozens of CDN providers, which can make it hard to determine which is right for your small business. We take a brief look at some of the questions you may have:
Is a CDN Worth It?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network which consists of a network of data centers that are distributed in strategic geographic locations. It works to provide fast delivery of content on the Internet by storing it in several caches – delivering a user the cache that’s geographically closest to them.But why use a CDN? Here are some performance-related advantages which are self-explanatory:
- Boost in SEO-friendliness
- Edge over aged hosts with low performance
- Considerably cheap for what you get
- Easy API availability and integrations
- Lower costs overall due to increased efficiency
- Increased reliability
- Decreased latency
- Faster performance
- Full-feature security in place
- DDoS protection
Therefore, whether or not this is a useful feature for your small business depends on your user base and where these users are located around the world. Typically, if they’re all within a 1,000-mile radius of your server, a CDN perhaps isn’t necessary. But if you have a content-heavy site or a high volume of traffic, a CDN can work wonders for your SEO and create a great user experience.