5 Ways the StackPath CDN Wins over Cloudflare: A Customer Review

Resource

Blog

Topic

Edge Delivery

Date

Aug 26, 2020

Author

There are a lot of options for CDN providers these days, each one (rightfully) touting itself with its best foot forward. There’s also an ecosystem of third-party review sites, that while seemingly impartial can be far from it as they try to monetize their rankings and reviews.

The result: CDN comparison shopping consumes valuable time and at the end you’re still left wondering who to trust.

Our customer, CynderHost, recently – and without our involvement or awareness – decided to conduct their own test of our CDN, in comparison to that of CloudFlare, and publish their findings. You can view their results yourself, and we’ve also captured the highlights below.

While not surprised, we’re very pleased with the results, and hope this unvarnished viewpoint provides clarity amidst the noise that CDN reviews can provide.

Overall, we see StackPath consistently beating Cloudflare by 10-20% when it comes to overall load time, latency, and TTFB.

Ivan Lin, CEO and Co-founder of CynderHost

Here are 5 ways the StackPath CDN wins over Cloudflare as reported by CynderHost.

  1. TTFB (Time-To-First-Byte)
    Plain and simple. StackPath beat Cloudflare by 2-3x in server performance test cases.
  2. Small File Delivery and Full Site Delivery
    StackPath beat Cloudflare by 20-60 ms in small file (<100KB) image and full website loading test cases.
  3. Latency
    “StackPath blows Cloudflare out of the water” when it comes to network latency. When bypassing cache, StackPath outperformed by 300 ms in full website load time and 100 ms difference in TTFB; coming “pretty close to unproxied latency.”
  4. Large File Delivery
    StackPath beat Cloudflare in all five large file (17MB) speed tests, delivering the same file up to 25% faster.
  5. PoPs
    “More PoPs aren’t necessarily good”. More PoPs also means that more edge caches have to be primed for a website to achieve the full benefits of a CDN. With StackPath and its generous cache/purge policies, this can mean less required origin pulls.

Offering ‘blazing fast’ hosting to our customers is only as good as what’s working behind the scenes. StackPath’s CDN is critical to our business for its extreme speed, low-latency, and developer friendly platform.

Ivan Lin, CEO and Co-founder of CynderHost

Learn more about the StackPath CDN.

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