With affordable pay-as-you-go pricing and a massive quality CDN network of 70 data center locations spanning across all continents; CDNSun has gained attention.
In this review I looked under the hood to compared their services in 2024.
I’ve devided this review into four chapters; enjoy.
Index of Contents
Comparison
Let’s see how CDNSun ranks in price and the amount of worldwide data center locations in comparison with the rest of the low-cost CDNs.
| CDN Provider | CDNSun | KeyCDN | BunnyCDN | CDN77 | BelugaCDN |
| Europe & North America |
$0.05/GB | $0.04/GB | $0.010/GB | $0.049/GB | $0.01/GB |
| Asia & Oceania | $0.11/GB | $0.04/GB | $0.030/GB | $0.125/GB | $0.01/GB |
| South America | $0.15/GB | $0.04/GB | $0.045/GB | $0.185/GB | $0.01/GB |
| Locations | 70 PoPs | 25 PoPs | 16 PoPs | 32 PoPs | 28 PoPs |
Price Point
The above CDN providers present the lowest pricing in the industry; as you can see there is small differences in which CDNSun remains competitive.
Where CDNSun loses is it’s pricing for smaller websites. They have a minimum deposit of $45 which will expire for the unused portion after a year has passed. So each credit deposited has a maximum validity period of 12 months in total.
Let’s say you have (a) 450000 monthly visitors with an (b) average page view of 2 per visit (c) and average page size of 1MB; you are paying $3.75/month, $45/year.
With less traffic/bandwidth needs; considering other CDN providers is worthwhile.
Please note that the above noted price is subject to changes; based on an average according to CDNSun cost calculator (click on the pricing link to get there).
Reach Point
As you can see, CDNSun is the leader in terms of global reach; while not the only factor it is a must to consider for those with more strategic location requirements.
Even compared to (VS) high-traffic services with more expensive, monthly pricing the amount of PoPs (points-of-interest) or server locations is very high:
- StackPath (former MaxCDN) has 22 PoPs
- Fastly has 34 PoPs
- CDNetworks has 68 PoPs
- Cloudflare has 86 PoPs
- Incapsula has 29 PoPs
- CDNSun has 70 PoPs
Pros & Cons
CDNSun Pros
- Premium SSD Network;
70 data centers in 5 continents with fast SSD storage. - Low pricing;
Charge your account with credits and use them pay-as-you-go. - Advanced options;
There are plenty of settings to please advanced users and it is easy enough for beginners or non-advanced to figure out. - Enabling & disabling server locations;
Fine tune CDN server locations based on preference or to save in costs. - Domain HTTPS;
Use your own domain (recommended) as the CNAME for content delivery with a free SSL certificate provided by Let’s Encrypt. - Feature rich;
Supports Nginx based live streaming, on-demand video streaming via different formats, rtmp live streams & more.. - Pull & Push;
Both pulling and pushing of content available. - Fast Support;
Within my experience support has been fairly fast & efficient.
CDNSun Cons
- Advanced options;
Having all those advanced settings (which they have put aside for the most part) might put off at first glance and the control panel design is not so clear. Check the below tutorial for an easy grasp of how the system works. - No Image Optimization;
Have to use a third party solution to optimize images. - Not cheapest option;
Even cheaper low-cost CDN exist for less demanding websites. - Credits expire;
Minimum payment is at $45 and each paid credit has a validity period of exactly 1 year. Any unused balance will expire if not used within the period.
Speed Test
Here I have conducted a fairly simple speed on a test site running WordPress; to see what kind of potential performance & speed improvements you could expect.
Origin server was in Vultr’s fast SSD cloud in New York.
Page load speeds from Melbourne, Australia improved from an average of 3.16s/page to 932 ms/page; this was with a page size of 810 kB.
Page load speeds from Stockholm in Sweden, Europe improved from an average of 1.19s/page to 369 ms/page; this was with a page size of 810 kB.
Quick Tutorial
Amongst all the available options; the most common task is to set up a pull zone. This is a container for the CDN which will automatically pull the contents of your website into all the data center locations around the world for fast access!
Below you can see what the backend looks like. While not the most beautiful place — it certainly gets the job done! Let me show you exactly how.
First you will need to sign up for your free trial (no credit card needed).
Then navigate to the following to add a new pull service:
Services –> New Service –> Pull –> CND Service Domain (CNAME)
Next choose a CDN Service Domain known as CNAME.
You have two options. Either (a) use a subdomain provided by CDNSun or (b) more elegantly create a subdomain from your own domain name.
Subdomain is easier to set up & needs to be in the following format:
[mycompany].r.worldssl.net
You will most likely want to enable a secure HTTPS connection between the CDN and website visitor (and it’s free thanks to Let’s Encrypt SSL support).
This will require you to open up the “Advanced Settings” and simply change the “Origin Protocol” to HTTPS. Please, leave “Shared SSL” option as disabled.
Finally choose “Create Service“.
Note! To fully secure the connection you will also need a second SSL certificate between your website and the CDN; configured with your hosting company.
Next you’ll need to navigate to “Certs” and add the free “SNI LE” certificates. Which is a domain validated SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt (LE).
After selecting the certificate type & CNAME; choose “Add Certificate“.
It will take up to 20 minutes for the CDN service to propagate.
CDNSun provides instructions on setting up WordPress and other website hosting environments. For WordPress you can see above how it’s done with the popular and free W3 Total Cache plugin.
Simply fill in the CNAME you added in the previous steps and make sure that SSL support is enabled if appropriate. Happy fast content delivering!
Final words:
The CDNSun content delivery provider really manages to stand from the crowd but brings a big disappointment for smaller sites. Many however may continue with the service despite loosing value in the form of expired credits.
If you are looking for CDNSun alternatives; I would suggest having a look at BunnyCDN for content delivery; which is by far the easiest CDN service I have ever seen. They also offer low pay-as-you go pricing with free SSL certificates & good enough global reach for most websites.
The amount of data center locations (PoPs) is not everything of course!
The interface could be easier but on the plus side there are some advanced features available that can be useful to fine tune the CDN. And overall setting up CDN is a very simple process anyway.
Thank you for reading my review on CDNSun.
Comments, experiences, questions on CDN services welcome!
Note: This website is affiliated with CDNSun and having clicked some of the links on this page it is possible that purchases are counted towards affiliate commission.