Akamai

Good for international companies, in scenarios where big files are downloaded it could be very expensive.We use the CDN service to avoid network congestion problems especially when it comes to distribution of heavy content such as graphics and videos. Distributing content to users from our datacenter was not feasible. CDNs facilitate this task and allow sharing of text, graphics, scripts and multimedia files and software downloads, video streaming on demand ...

Akamai is best suited for CDN use. They have very awesome support for caching on edge locations. The security feature is very awesome to prevent any DDoS attacks.

Store documents that need to be accessed by multiples users at the same time, saving in Internet cost. Also helps to keep the storage cost low and increase customer satisfaction as the downloads are fast, reliable, and geographical close to the customer. We use Akamai to store and share documents with several hundred users concurrently.

This technology greatly reduces the time needed and also the speed at which our pages are served. It is not well suited for dynamic content.

I think Akamai is an excellent tool for an organization that deals with high volumes of traffic and wants to provide a solution for improving content delivery. For a small organization, Akamai may not be the best and most affordable solution.

The Akamai Property Manager is the latest version in the configuration management portal for managing edge caching configurations that have improved from its previous version. On the other side, the UI is not very user-friendly and needs to be improved.

It is well suited for large complex organizations that require detailed web-based solution and a flexible vendor who can handle any and all issues.

It is not that well suited for smaller organizations simply to do to costs and resource constraints within the same, i.e. many small organizations would not have Akamai skilled developers on hand and or would not need to take advantage or even understand the multitude of web-based solutions Akamai offers.

Well suited:
- If your organization is serving customers globally, and you have a website catering to customers from different regions globally, a CDN can speed up your content delivery as traffic can route to nearest edge server instead of the origin.
- Your organization has a lot of micro-sites, subdomains aside from the main site.
- If your site requires an additional layer of protection ie. DDoS protection

Less appropriate:
Your organization is localized in a specific region/country. CDN may not have as much benefit in this case.

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.

Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.

Akamai is (as far as I'm aware) class leading in it's offering, although I haven't used anything else - but it is a really excellent CDN where you don't need to update your file references or anything like that, since you pass through Akamai's edge servers IT development teams don't need to change the way in which they would work in order to get the benefits. In terms of less well-suited scenarios - it's hard to say since you couldn't really use it for purposes other than what it's designed for, although the rules do allow for some pretty impacting changes to be possible, you could potentially take the site down if you were working uninformed.

Akamai are the leaders in content delivery networks and their service reflects that. If you want a fast experience for your users then a reliable CDN is essential and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Akamai.

At times when we need a piece of content on the site to display at an EXACT time and we have to be 100% sure that all assets are loaded and changed to the minute Akamai still allowed us to have caching for the bits we need and the flexibility to refresh the pieces of content that we needed.

Akamai Ion is hands down the best CDN for any enterprise level company.

We had a terrible experience. I would never recommend them to a colleague, unfortunately. In fact, I advise people to stay away no matter what.