Fastly, headquartered in San Francisco, offers the Fastly Edge Cloud Computing, Content Delivery Network (CDN) (formerly Fastly Deliver@Edge). Priced by bandwidth in gigabytes and number of file requests, Fastly supports image optimization, video and streaming, load balancing, and cloud security via web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection. Additionally, Fastly is available as a managed CDN.
$0
per 10,000 requests
OnApp CDN
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OnApp, headquartered in London, provides a content delivery network (CDN).
The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.
OnApp CDN is great for virtually any site with a desire or requirement to offload processing resources to a content delivery network in general. The OnApp CDN is one of the largest, if not largest CDNs on the planet and is well equipped to handle virtually any type of file distribution, including video. Video distribution POPs on the OnApp CDN are less available because each host that offers video has special requirements they may or may not be willing to get involved with. If you plan to distribute video on OnApp CDN first check if the number of POPs available for serving video suit your needs
We compared VMware for its virtualization capabilities and ended up deciding on OnApp as the UI was more intuitive for less technical support staff, which meant that our customers would have more staff available to help them with cloud related issues. We also checked our Akamai specifically for CDN however again the OnApp platform seemed simpler and less expensive to leverage, and with the added benefit that we had more control of the CDN 'in-house' than using a fully third party platform
OnApp in general has been a good investment, though in the early days this was a questionable result as stability was nothing like what it is today. Things have gotten much better over the years and I would anticipate OnApp to generate ROI so long as customers are looking for cloud and CDN solutions in general. I'm not sure that investing in OnApp as a hosting provider specifically for the CDN capability will generate any positive return, but the OnApp system as a whole has the features required that most should be able to make a return on.
