Considerations for choosing a CDN - WordPress Tutorial

- [Instructor] The list of CDN service providers is a long one, so how do you know which one to choose or which one is best? In this lesson, I'd like to cover some key considerations for choosing a CDN. After that, we'll look at some of the more popular ones and break them down by their key features. So once you've decided that a CDN is right for you, what are the factors to look at to help you make the best choice for your website? You'll want to know what sort of cost to expect each month and how easily you can integrate the CDN service with your site. Now, my third priority is, "Will it get the job done?" How a CDN gets the job done can look different depending on your priorities. One consideration is a large network of data centers. Whatever geographical area your audience's in, you'll want to make sure the CDN you pick has great coverage in that area. Another is scalability. Is your site the type where you might see big traffic spikes? For instance, if you're an e-commerce site and it's black Friday, you want a CDN that can immediately scale to meet the demand and then scale back down as traffic tapers. Another thing to consider is security. If you want things like DDOS protection or the ability to use your own SSL certificate, you'll want to make sure your CDN provider can accommodate. The next thing to think about is how much control do you want over the specifics of your CDN. CDNs can get pretty technical in terms of features. Do you want something that's super simple to set up or do you want to have granular control over things like caching rules, purging, et cetera. Then, do you live stream video from your site or do users need to be able to stream video on demand? If so, you need a CDN that supports that. And speaking of support, you may want some. Support usually comes in three flavors; chat, email, and phone. Your support preferences and the time it takes to get a response can factor in to the CDN you choose. That's a lot to take in but those are the major things to think about when you're searching for a CDN. And just to be clear, there is no one size fits all. There are a lot of CDNs out there and for the rest of this chapter, I'll highlight some of the more popular ones for WordPress.