CLOUDFLARE
VS. THE WORLD

The people's champion. In 2018, Cloudflare democratized CDN and security with a generous free tier — DDoS protection, DNS, SSL, and CDN at zero cost. Workers serverless platform just launched, bringing code to the edge. Over 150 PoPs and growing aggressively. The go-to for startups and small sites who can't afford Akamai.

The original titan — founded at MIT in 1998. By 2018, Akamai delivers roughly 30% of ALL web traffic through 240,000+ servers. The most distributed network ever built. Enterprise-grade DDoS (Prolexic), advanced WAF, and bot management. But premium pricing, complex contracts, and no free tier lock out smaller players.

The developer's darling. Built on Varnish with instant cache purges (~150ms globally). In 2018, Fastly powers GitHub, Stripe, and The New York Times. VCL-based edge configuration gives engineers granular control. Real-time log streaming. Pay-as-you-go pricing. Fewer PoPs but each is optimized for speed over quantity.

Amazon's CDN running on the AWS backbone. In 2018, CloudFront has 100+ edge locations with deep S3 and Lambda@Edge integration. AWS Shield Standard provides DDoS protection. Natural choice for AWS-native stacks. But the console is complex, pricing is unpredictable, and it creates deep ecosystem lock-in.

The affordable Swiss contender. In 2018, KeyCDN offers pay-as-you-go pricing from just $0.04/GB with no monthly minimums. Simple HTTP/2 push support, real-time analytics, and Let's Encrypt SSL. Popular with WordPress users via CDN Enabler plugin. Limited security features — no WAF, no advanced DDoS, no edge compute.