Akami CDN was far better than Amazon CDN, I don't see much security aspect on Amazon CloudFront Due to which we moved to Akami.
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Employee
Chose Akamai
I don't have any direct experience with any of the other CDNs, so it's hard to say. Like any solution out there, each service will have its pros and cons. Some will fit your business needs more than others. Akamai is amongst the best and meets our business needs.
Akamai is a leader in CDN domain with adaptive media delivery and download delivery and it helps work by reducing the distance between your website and your target audience. It also provides 24X7 support services.
I am just getting into AWS at work and it will be difficult to supplant the incumbent Akamai solution as there is simply nothing wrong with it - from my point of view. I suspect we will be looking at integrating Akamai/AWS solutions in the future as the effort and or business …
Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more …
I have not evaluated or used any direct competitors for Akamai, so it's hard to say how it compares. All I know is that Akamai is very powerful and has now become an integral part of our existing set-up.
I haven't had much experience with other CDNs and to be honest I haven't heard of many more other than Akamai which just goes to show which one is the most trusted and proves to be the best. There are others out there, such as CloudFlare, that claim to provide a similar service …
CloudFlare and CloudFront are good for small sites where budgetary costs are the primary concern but Akamai Ion provides a new level of quality and performance.
CloudFlare is much easier to use. It is much cheaper and from our experience, it works so much better. The support staff at CloudFlare has always been helpful and will get on the phone when we need help. Also, CloudFlare helped us get set up on their platform in about an hour …
Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.