10 most popular CDN features in 2018



Content delivery networks appeared in the late 1990’s during the Internet boom. In 20 years, the global increase in traffic and content volumes has set high standards for CDN providers in terms of performance and safety.

But it is functional flexibility that makes a CDN technically modern—in other words, what abilities in automating management of content delivery the service has under the hood.

We wondered which CDN functions are really used by our customers in 2018. We have collected statistics on the most popular of them.

Convenient caching

Cache expiry. Sets the time during which the content is stored on a CDN server. Used on 2,136 resource.

Override origin cache settings. Allows to ignore caching settings on the source. Used on 343 resources.

Always online. Gives the last cached content when the origin server is unavailable. Used on 1,982 resources.

Ignore Set-Cookies. Reduces the percentage of cached traffic. Used on 322 resources.

Ignore query-string. Determines whether the files should be cached if a URL address contains a unique query string. Used on 911 resources.

Cost-effective storage

Large files delivery optimization. Speeds up caching of large files. Used on 903 resources.

Compression on CDN. Lets you compress the content using gzip within CDN, where it is not possible to compress files on the origin. Used on 1,090 resources.

Customized delivery

Add headers. Specifies unique HTTP headers that CDN servers will be adding to the files of a CDN resource. Used on 235 resources.

Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. Protects the content from being downloaded from third-party websites. Used on 145 resources.

Rewrite. Changes and redirects content request paths. Used by 72 resources.

All features and possibilities