MaxCDN Review - Release the Potential Speed in Your Website!

Let's face it, I'm a sucker for fast websites. If a website doesn't load fully within five seconds, I'll close the tab; and yes, I'm serious about that. There are many reasons that factor into why a website may be slow: it could be that the server's network is slow, it could be there are too many users on at the same time, or it could even be your location! The last part of that list is what MaxCDN is all about. MaxCDN is a content delivery network that essentially accesses your content for you and delivers it to the user using the closest server.

Location has a huge effect on load times on any website. For example, the Tech Cores VPS is hosted in Germany at a powerful datacenter. For our readers in Germany, Tech Cores should be very fast for you, but for our viewers in California, not so much. Nowadays, we have a wonderful invention called fiber optics, but even that doesn't make our websites load in a blink of an eye everywhere we are.

In order to fix these speed issues related to location, you need to get the user accessing a nearby server. If you're a larger company like AOL, you can obviously afford a hundred dedicated (and rather beastly) servers throughout the world, but what about us smaller guys? We need to use a system like MaxCDN to get that done for us without hurting our pocketbook.

What MaxCDN can do for you

Because of MaxCDN's powerful network, you can be certain that you'll be getting a quick and reliable service. MaxCDN has partnered up with upstream provider Mzima to provide their fast internet service.

It's not only that MaxCDN are already on a powerful network, it's also for the fact that they have ten edge connections and nine peer locations! If you're near an edge location, you know your content will be delivered very quickly. If you're near an peer network, it won't be delivered as quickly as a edge connection would be, but it might be reassuring that MaxCDN's network latency in the US is less than 10ms from most US locations!

Ohh yeah, it might be helpful if we said that not only can MaxCDN make your website faster, it can also make your Google search rankings higher! It has been a proven fact that Google does rank your website upon its speed and if your website is fast, you have an advantage right there!

It might even be beneficial to tell you that MaxCDN can serve practically everything you put to to it. MaxCDN can server CSS files, JavaScript, images, larger files like PDFs and e-books, video and audio streaming, and lastly, live video and audio!

Pricing

There's nothing that can prevent you from going with MaxCDN as your CDN provider. As of right now, MaxCDN has an offer going on for 1TB of bandwidth for only $39.95! If it's not just me, but that's 25GB for every dollar spent! Call that a deal that's hard not to get.

After that, bandwidth doesn't cost much at all; it's in fact, as low as 3.9 cents per GB.

As for the bandwidth/data pricing of the live streaming and storage for the VOD/Push zones (which are for video/audio), please take a look at the chart above.

Speed and Benefits

MaxCDN is simply fast. If you haven't noticed, Tech Cores is extremely fast now with MaxCDN's service. There's not much to say about the speed but that it sped up the website a lot!

On the other hand, the benefits of MaxCDN have easily been taking effect during the last month. Our bandwidth has been significantly lower than last months and our hits went down by almost 4x! I think it would be more than accurate to say that MaxCDN is saving us 4x the amount of resources that we used to use!

There is one benefit of MaxCDN that some people don't think of. Because MaxCDN is basically offloading the content on the website for you, you're less prone for large (D)DoS attacks that'll bring down your server(s). If there's not much content to (D)DoS on your server because it's being driven by MaxCDN, that's another major benefactor for you.

Even our average server load has been much lower now that most of the content is coming from MaxCDN and not our server.

The Set Up

The set up of MaxCDN could not be any simpler. You may think MaxCDN is only for images on the web, but MaxCDN also allows you to set up a pull zone (used for images, JavaScript files, etc), a push zone (which are used for larger static files like installers or PDFs), a VOD zone (used for streaming audio/video content), and lastly, a live zone which would be used for streaming audio/video content.

Integrating MaxCDN into your current website couldn't be any easier. If you're using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to run your site, the third-party plugins that are available will take care of the setting up task for you. On the other hand, if you're running a completely custom site, it'll still be extremely easy to set up; you just need to make sure you link your content to the CDN instead of to the server itself.

I've only used a pull zone so far, so I cannot speak for all of the others. For the pull zone, it offers extreme customizability to even give you a fancy-looking URL to your CDN -- which in our case, is cdn.techcores.com. If you're not sure on how to set that up, MaxCDN will help you with that if you need to. For you server gurus, it's just a simple CNAME declaration in the Bind (or whatever DNS server you use) configuration.

When I was setting up Tech Cores for MaxCDN, it took less than five minutes and we were up immediately. It was such a painless process, that I'm sure MaxCDN will attract even the simplest of web-savvy users who're wanting to speed up their own site.

If you're a bit wary if MaxCDN will work for you, check out their integrations page at the below link to see if it'll work with your current CMS programs:

http://www.maxcdn.com/integrations.php

Collecting Data

The next part of this review is mainly focused on data collection. If you're using a CDN like MaxCDN, you'll loose some of the statistical data that you once had coming from your server. Because of this exact reason, you'll need statistical data collection on MaxCDN.

It's without a doubt that MaxCDN does an amazing job at collecting all of this data. With its amazing statistical information and its rather elegant looking graphs, you'll be a pro at reading this statistical information.

MaxCDN offers many statistical options for you: you have access to view the total amount transfer (of most simply, bandwidth), percent of cache hits, most popular files, nodes hit (which is just the stats for how often every node, or server location, is accessed), daily unique IP visits (you can see this graph under the "Speed and Benefits" section of the review, and the live zone stats.

There's really nothing else I can talk about other than to just say take a look at the thumbnails above! The graphics being generated are extremely useful and they can really tell you how your website is doing.

Reliability & Limitations

It's certain that MaxCDN is an amazing service, but the reliability is a major factor that should be considered. MaxCDN itself is extremely reliable and has never been down for me, but what has, unfortunately, been down would be their login center (or their front-end to their entire service).

Of course, nothing is perfect and managing a custom login system can be difficult, but it would be nice to see these issues sorted out. It's not something that'll bring your site down, of course, but it's not like you need to access their login center all of the time. I understand the occasional downtime, but if they know it's there, it would be nice to find the source of it and stop it from happening.

Other than that tiny issue, MaxCDN is as stable as any other service I've ever used. I've never seen MaxCDN fail to deliver my content and in fact, it's always extremely fast.

You're probably thinking with such an amazing service, are there any limitations to what you can or cannot do. To basically say this in one sentence, you can make MaxCDN do what ever you please.

If you're wanting to create a VOD/push zone or even a live zone, you'll need to pay some additional costs for storage and et cetera. In one way, you shouldn't think of this as a limitation in the first place. You should think of this as to keep the costs for MaxCDN low enough so anyone can afford it. So in the long run, it's no limitation at all and it's in fact helping you save money if you don't need these features offered by MaxCDN.

The last limitation I have to point out is that there's no easy way to manage your MaxCDN account from a mobile device -- you have to open up the web browser. It may be nice if there was a mobile-based app for on-the-go management and stats.

Summary

MaxCDN has a great service here that's filled with a huge potential to not only speed up your website but also increase it in its rankings. If you're looking for a reliable content delivery service to speed up your website while still cutting costs and not paying as much, MaxCDN is a perfect solution for you.

Overall, I have to give my thumbs up to the guys over at MaxCDN for creating such an amazing and rather custom service. It's custom enough so that I can set it up how I want it and also tweak the settings along with it.

If you want to read more about MaxCDN, please check out their website below:

http://www.maxcdn.com/

But wait, there's more!

I'm not trying to get this to sound like an infomercial, I promise on that one, but one thing I should point out that MaxCDN is powered by a company called NetDNA, who offers a dedicated CDN system. If you're a larger business needing some powerful CDN solutions take a look at NetDNA for more information. It's basically MaxCDN, but it's meant for larger websites who need a dedicated CDN solution.

Just a note for everyone... at a time, I did work for MaxCDN, however, this review was written before I was working with them. Of course, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to send your regards over to me via Twitter (below) :)