Choosing a CDN provider

There are a lot more CDN providers than there are cloud service providers (though most of the cloud services providers also offer CDNs). For an art website in particular, but also for any site hosting large assets like big images or videos, which CDN you choose is going to have a major impact on the costs of your website, as you will be charged for the amount of bandwidth you use.

CDN Market Players

The share of the CDN market held by companies can be bit confusing: I'd suggest reading this article to learn more about it: https://blog.intricately.com/cdn-industry-trends-market-share-customer-size . Here's the graphs from that article and some key takeaways.

As can be seen, the major players are CloudFlare, AWS (CloudFront), and Akamai. For using a CDN to serve static content - personally I would recommend none of these. Explanation of why is later on in this article, but comes down to cost and pricing structure.

Considerations

There are two main things you will want to consider when choosing a CDN for static content: configuration and price. Choosing a CDN for security purposes (as an entry point for your website) is a different question, and is not covered here.

Configuration

Some CDN providers offer fairly simple functionality ("simple" here still being fairly advanced), while others have huge amounts of configuration you can apply to your CDN. Depending on your use case, and what you know you need, this can rule out some providers if you need specific things available.

Price

For a lot of websites, this is going to be the overriding consideration. CDN costs vary massively between providers, and for a website hosting large assets like an art website, CDN costs are going to be a very significant part of your outgoings, and likely the biggest.

Before we look at some CDN providers, here is a quick overview of how CDN pricing works.

CDN pricing structure

The general way CDNs are priced is that you are charged per GB you send to users; i.e. all the bandwidth used to send images and other files to your website's visitors. Note that this price is usually different for each world 'region': most CDNs let you choose which regions your CDN will serve traffic from, to let you control the costs somewhat.

There is also frequently a price set for each request made to the CDN for a particular resource, e.g. an image. This number is naturally going to be huge, and so these requests are often priced in big units, e.g. per 10,000 requests or such like.

CDN providers: a brief overview

This is not an exhaustive list, but a basic overview of some CDN providers at the time of writing.

Amazon CloudFront

Part of AWS. Cloudfront falls squarely into the "powerful but expensive" category; it has a ton of configuration potential, and extremely good reliability and speed.

Offsetting that is the price - it is one of the most expensive CDNs to use. Here's part of their pricing page as of Dec 8th 2023:

The important price of note here is that bandwidth per GB to the cheapest regions, which is almost always US & EU, is $0.085/GB. While this cost can be offset a bit by using AWS' CloudFront savings bundle (which requires you to pay for 12 months' usage in advance, effectively letting you get a discount on your bill so long as you know you will use at least that much bandwidth), it is still expensive compared to some other providers.

Fastly

Fastly is another "powerful but expensive" provider. Pricing from their website on 8th Dec 2023:

This is even more expensive than CloudFront. It might not seem it at first glance, but $0.12/GB is a lot more than $0.085, remember that zero!

CloudFlare

CloudFlare is rather unique among CDN providers for having a 'free plan' which doesn't cost anything. However, this can be something of a misnomer: although it is genuinely free, it is not free without limit. It's intended for small websites, not business websites, and CloudFlare reserves the right to restrict or remove a website from their CDN that e.g. uses the free plan for business use.

This is not deception on CloudFlare's part, but more a misunderstanding of some people thinking that the CloudFlare CDN is free for any use case when it isn't. It is primarily for use as a security screen for HTML files and other small content, not hosting big static content files like images or videos, which CloudFlare has specific services for. You can read an update they made in mid-2023 about this here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/ . 

The point here is that, for a business use case like an art website, the free plan is not going to be something you can use for static content purposes. You would have to use the Pro or Business plans, which may end up being more expensive than another provider depending on how much usage you need; make sure you know exactly what is and is not offered before deciding to use Cloudflare as a CDN, as it is not as simple to estimate the costs as it might seem.