Fastly

Fastly is a San Francisco-based versatile cloud company with a lengthy roster of big-name customers such as the New York Times, Spotify, Github, Kickstarter, Ticketmaster, Deliveroo, and more. Fastly’s CDN follows the simpler-than-most Cloudflare-like reverse proxy model.

Instead of giving you a ‘cdn.mydomain.com’ address where you can store specific files, Fastly routes all website traffic through its servers. To make this work, you must update the CNAME record for your site with the domain registrar, but after that, it ‘just works’, no website code changes are required.

Fastly has points of presence (PoP) worldwide – 20 locations in North America, 6 in South America, 13 in Europe, 8 in Asia, 6 in New Zealand and Australia, and 2 in Africa – so most web users should get a speedy response. Fastly has highly configurable support for video caching. It can deliver any HTTP-based media streaming protocol, including Apple’s HLS, Adobe’s HDS, and MPEG-DASH.

The service does its best to keep your content safe, with support for encryption, DRM, and secure tokens that restrict access to your media (your web app provides these, and they expire after a configurable period.) Enterprise-level security features include a fully configurable web application firewall, capable DDoS mitigation, intelligent bot detection, and blocking.

Fastly’s HTTPS support is comprehensive. Tired of CDNs expecting you to be impressed by their support for HTTP/2? Fastly supports the speedy UDP-based HTTP/3. That won’t help you much right now (the big-name browsers support HTTP/3, but it’s turned off by default), but it’s good to know the available option. Fastly already has impressive real-world performance in other areas, though, including the ability to purge everything in the cache – that’s global, in every single PoP – in 150ms or less. The company uses this speed to enable the caching of ‘event-driven’ content.

Fastly offers three pricing plans: Starter, Advantage, and Ultimate. The Starter plan includes 500M requests per month, 20 services, and 100 backends. The Advantage plan includes 2B monthly requests, 30 services, and 200 backends. The Ultimate plan includes 5B requests per month, 50 services, and 400 backends.

All plans include Fastly Full Site Delivery which uses Fastly’s global content delivery capabilities to cache and accelerates the delivery of your HTTP-based file content such as video, images, CSS, and Javascript files, as well as HTML and API responses.

In conclusion, Fastly is a feature-packed and highly configurable CDN for demanding business users with many powerful features, such as highly configurable support for video caching and enterprise-level security features, including a fully configurable web application firewall. It offers three pricing plans: Starter, Advantage, and Ultimate, with varying levels of requests per month, services, and backends.