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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Amazon CloudFront vs MaxCDN

Amazon CloudFront vs MaxCDN

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
MaxCDN
MaxCDN
Stacks1.6K
Followers553
Votes100

Amazon CloudFront vs MaxCDN: What are the differences?

What is Amazon CloudFront? Content delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

What is MaxCDN? Our CDN makes your site load faster!. The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

Amazon CloudFront and MaxCDN belong to "Content Delivery Network" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Amazon CloudFront are:

  • Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.
  • Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.
  • Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.

On the other hand, MaxCDN provides the following key features:

  • We Make You Fast- With our fast-growing network of multiple PoP locations in all parts of the globe, we mirror your content and deliver it to the neared location to your visitors. It isn't just our network that is fast, but with our state-of-art hardware, fast RAM and SSD storage, content is served at lightning fast speeds.
  • We Have Your Back- To ensure that you do not have any downtime, we have deployed redundant networks and intelligent routing that ensures selecting an alternative route if a network pathway is down.
  • We Help You Rank- Using MaxCDN will help you improve your website speed, and since this is now a ranking factor used by Google and other search engines for deciding search results, deploying MaxCDN will help you rank better, giving you more traffic.

"Fast" is the top reason why over 245 developers like Amazon CloudFront, while over 46 developers mention "Easy setup" as the leading cause for choosing MaxCDN.

Airbnb, Spotify, and Dropbox are some of the popular companies that use Amazon CloudFront, whereas MaxCDN is used by Stack Exchange, Disqus, and Accenture. Amazon CloudFront has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3387 company stacks & 621 developers stacks; compared to MaxCDN, which is listed in 887 company stacks and 109 developer stacks.

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Advice on Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN

Francesco
Francesco

CTO at ORDR.menu

Dec 1, 2021

Decided

I don't think I have registered a domain in the last 10 years that hasn't been linked to CloudFlare within the first 2 hours from registration.

The benefits you get from even the free version of CloudFlare are amazing. From day 0:

  • 30/80% of bandwidth savings thanks to their CDN
  • Origin IP address protection
  • Managed SSL
53k views53k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
MaxCDN
MaxCDN

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.;Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.;Cost-Effective- Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.;Elastic- With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for your content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.;Reliable- Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest available location as required by network conditions.;Global- Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.
We Make You Fast- With our fast-growing network of multiple PoP locations in all parts of the globe, we mirror your content and deliver it to the neared location to your visitors. It isn't just our network that is fast, but with our state-of-art hardware, fast RAM and SSD storage, content is served at lightning fast speeds.;We Have Your Back- To ensure that you do not have any downtime, we have deployed redundant networks and intelligent routing that ensures selecting an alternative route if a network pathway is down.;We Help You Rank- Using MaxCDN will help you improve your website speed, and since this is now a ranking factor used by Google and other search engines for deciding search results, deploying MaxCDN will help you rank better, giving you more traffic.;We Help You Track- Our flexible and configurable reporting tool will allow you to track bandwidth usage, cache hits and multiple other parameters on an overall as well as per zone-basis.;HTTP Referrer Protection to prevent hot-linking, customizable caching of query strings, and the ability to use a custom robot.txt are supported.;MaxCDN also supports SSL with instant SSL setup of shared, custom, as well as wildcard SSL and other SSL-related features
Statistics
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
1.6K
Followers
10.8K
Followers
553
Votes
935
Votes
100
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 245
    Fast
  • 166
    Cdn
  • 157
    Compatible with other aws services
  • 125
    Simple
  • 108
    Global
Cons
  • 3
    UI could use some work
  • 1
    Invalidations take so long
Pros
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 33
    Speed to my clients
  • 15
    Great service & Customer Support
  • 5
    Shared and Affordable SSL
Integrations
No integrations available
WordPress
WordPress
New Relic
New Relic

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN?

CloudFlare

CloudFlare

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

Fastly

Fastly

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

Limelight CDN

Limelight CDN

Whether it’s your website, mobile applications, videos, music, software, games, or APIs, your content needs to reach customers quickly, reliably, and securely. It provides the capacity, coverage, and performance to cost-effectively deliver a better experience for you and your customers.

cdnjs

cdnjs

Everyone loves the Google CDN? Even Microsoft runs their own CDN. The problem is, they only host the most popular libraries. We host it all - JavaScript, CSS, SWF, images, etc! Powered by CloudFlare.

Statically

Statically

A free, fast, & modern CDN for open source projects, WordPress, images, and any static assets.

Incapsula

Incapsula

Through an application-aware, global content delivery network (CDN), Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover solutions.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare CDN

A CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a web site: Cached content: By caching web site content, It helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server.

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