How to reduce CDN expenses

CDN helps speed up your website and improve its resilience. For many projects, these factors are pivotal. Therefore, you can’t do without CDN. But sometimes CDN expenses can be higher than you initially expected.

If this is your case, don’t jump to conclusions that CDN is unprofitable. Typically, CDN expenses can be optimized.

What does CDN pricing depend on?

The key factors affecting expenses:

• Amount of traffic consumed.
• Pricing plan.
• Additional paid features.
• Regions where the traffic comes from (some vendors can charge more for certain locations).
• CDN provider.

How to reduce CDN expenses?

To reduce the cost, you should try to optimize each of the following factors:

• Give up on unnecessary paid options.
• Try reducing the amount of traffic, especially from expensive regions.
• Switch to a more favorable pricing plan.
• Check if a different provider offers the same services cheaper.

Giving up on unnecessary paid options

Almost every CDN provider has additional paid options. For example, we offer origin shielding (an intermediate server providing protection of the origin server against high load), raw logs and advanced analytics.

If you have any of these options added, be sure to check how much you need them. Calculate how much you benefit from their use and compare your benefits with expenses. If expenses are higher, it would be reasonable to drop the option.

Reducing traffic volume

The amount of traffic is the key factor affecting price. The choice of a pricing plan also depends on it.

There are two main ways to reduce the amount of traffic.

1. Increase the caching percentage

The more content is cached, the less often CDN accesses the origin server to retrieve it.

When customers visit your website for the first time, a request is sent to the origin server. The information is stored on cache servers and served from them in case of further requests. The requests are not sent to the origin server, which means that less chargeable traffic goes through the network.

The greater your audience is and the fewer files you have, the higher the caching percentage should be.

In our experience, for example, the best option for gaming projects would be to cache over 90% of files, while for video streaming or online stores this can be upwards of 70%.

Gcore CDN provides analytics, with which you can check the caching percentage.

You can increase percentage by using caching settings on the CDN control panel. You will need a broad range of measures. The caching percentage, for instance, depends in many respects on the cache expiration time.

The longer the content is cached, the less data is requested from the origin server and the less traffic is consumed.

Static files, which are rarely changed, can be cached longer.

Our recommended cache expiration time is 4 days. But you should take into account project features. Somethings can be cached longer, while other files should be updated more often.

2. Compress the content with advanced algorithms

The smaller the size of files delivered over CDN, the less traffic is consumed.

Use advanced compression algorithms: Gzip, Brotli and WebP. They compress files on the fly during the delivery of content to users.

Gzip compresses text files. It reduces a web page by 60–70%. Brotli is capable of compressing any content. It compresses content 20–25% more efficiently than Gzip.

WebP is used to compress images. It compresses images without any loss in quality which is 26% better than PNG and 25–34% more efficient than JPEG.

Read also: “How to increase the website speed”.

Gcore CDN supports all three algorithms and can compress files upon delivery. This means that you don’t have to customize compression and write code on your own side. You can just upload the source code onto the origin server, and it will be compressed during delivery to users.

Gzip works on our servers and Brotli—on the origin shielding (an additional paid option). WebP is also available at an extra charge.

You can add these options for a while and check how useful they are for you. Most likely the savings you get from compression will be much higher than the charge for these additional options.

Checking where the traffic comes from

Check which locations the traffic comes from. Many providers can charge more for traffic from some regions. These are usually rare spots, such as Africa or Latin America.

Check if you need these locations at all. If you do, ask your provider if they can offer you a cheaper pricing plan.

Changing the pricing plan

If you can significantly reduce the amount of traffic, you can switch to a more favorable pricing plan.

If your attempts to reduce traffic lead to nowhere, check if your pricing plan is suited for your tasks. Probably, it has certain features you don’t need, and you should drop them. Or you don’t consume the amount of traffic included in the pricing plan and it turns out that you pay for unneeded gigabytes.

Or there could be a different situation where your pricing plan does not have enough traffic and you regularly pay for overconsumption. In this situation, it would be more efficient to switch to a pricing plan with more traffic included.

Changing the provider

The prices for the same services vary for different providers. You probably can find the same for less.

For example, our CDN prices are lower than many competitors.

Why choose Gcore CDN

1. The global infrastructure was awarded a Guinness World Record.
2. The global response time is less than 30 ms.
3. A user-friendly control panel, agile settings and features, free on all pricing plans.
4. Pricing plans for different tasks varying from a free plan for small projects to an enterprise plan on special terms without traffic limitations.
5. Same prices all over the world—lower than many competitors.

Test CDN for free and check its efficiency and reliability for yourself.

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