Akamai is the leading cloud provider to help companies deliver secure, high-performance user experience on any device, anywhere. If a user who ever shopped online, watched a web video, downloaded or connected to work remotely uses the cloud platform of Akamai.
Akamai helps businesses drive progress in the hyper-connected world by reducing technology challenges, so a company can concentrate on moving its business forward quickly. Akamai allows companies to leverage market opportunities, such as mobile and cloud trends while overcoming challenges posed by security threats and the need to reach users worldwide.
About Akamai CDN Company
Akamai, founded in 1998, is one of the world’s largest CDN suppliers. They are a publicly traded firm, have over 6000 employees, and represent 15 to 30% of all web traffic. They provide a very wide and comprehensive global coverage with CDN servers in thousands. Akamai was also known to resell its CDN services to other CDN providers, such as Microsoft Azure. Among Akamai’s most important customers are:
- Adobe
- IBM
- NBA
- New York Post
The Akamai Intelligent Network TM enters and provides the online business of a client with unprecedented reliability, security, and visibility. The Akamai CDN offers content effectively for internet browsing and downloading. It is accomplished by mirroring and placing content on strategic servers around the world from a centralized server. The network often mirrors all website contents, including software downloads, audio, graphics, animation, video, HTML, and CSS, depending on the website’s popularity.
In more than 1,000 networks out of 90 countries, Akamai provides services from over 100,000 servers. Akamai provides robust services to some of the best-known businesses worldwide with over 4,000 clients, including Adobe, Apple, Audi, BMW Japan, FedEx, Fujitsu, IBM Corporation, MySpace, Nintendo, Sony Ericsson.
Akamai ‘s Intelligent Internet Portal is the perfect alternative for online companies of all sizes. The network simplifies the industry by reducing resources and complexity. The service also guarantees consistent quality, speed, availability, and reliability.
What is Akamai?
Akamai is a huge internet company with more than 240,000 servers worldwide. Akamai has previously been working with some of the biggest names in technology, including Microsoft and Apple. Its services feature some of the largest websites on the internet, including Hulu.
This business is deeply tailored to meet the needs of large corporations. Akamai does not focus on one product but instead offers a range of services based on various patented Akamai technologies.
- Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform: a cloud-linked server network in 120 different countries.
- Content Delivery Process: Akamai has its own HTML and CSS item reflecting form.
- Peer to Peer Networking: allows users to access massive files directly from peers outside the network of Akamai.
Akamai CDN Network
Akamai’s PoP network is so vast that showing a map of their locations does not make sense. This CDN provider had over 216,000 servers in over 120 countries and over 1,500 networks worldwide during the time of this Akamai review. Compared to other CDN providers not so well known as Akamai, their network is very broad.
Some interesting information from their information page about Akamai Network include:
- Akamai provides day-to-day web traffic of more than 30 Terabits per second.
- Akamai has almost 3 trillion Internet connections every day.
- Eighty-five percent of the world’s Internet users are on one Akamai CDN server “network hop.”
Akamai CDN Features
Like other large organizations, it may often take a while to introduce a function or alter a procedure. Although Akamai has a vast network and currently has a wide variety of prominent customers, its list of features is not appealing to everyone. The following table provides a description of common CDN features and outlines which are currently supported by Akamai, which are extra costs and which are currently not supported.
| Feature | Supported? |
|---|---|
| Origin Pull | Yes |
| Origin Push | Yes |
| Custom Rules | Yes |
| API | Yes |
| ALPN | Yes |
| Raw Logs | Yes |
| Gzip | Yes |
| HTTP/2 | Yes |
| Shared SSL | Yes |
| Free Support | Yes |
| Custom SSL | Yes (Extra cost) |
| Origin Shield | Yes (Extra cost) |
| DDoS Protection | Yes (Unknown if there is an extra cost) |
| Secure Token | Yes (Unknown if there is an extra cost) |
| Additional Zones | Yes (Unknown if there is an extra cost) |
| Instant Purge | No |
| Real-time Statistics | No |
| Let’s Encrypt SSL | No |
Akamai CDN Pricing
As for the price structure of Akamai, there is no specific indication of the actual monthly cost per GB on their website. Users must contact Akamai directly via telephone, live chat or email, in order to receive a quote or sign up as a customer. A representative from Akamai will then address the CDN needs of your website and provide you with a customized quote.
That being said, other sources have quoted through online searches the price of Akamai in the range of $0.35/GB. For 1 TB of CDN bandwidth, the cost will, therefore, be $350. Similarly, the cost will be $3,500 for 10 TB of traffic.
Akamai CDN Review Conclusion
In short, Akamai is currently one of the world’s largest CDN suppliers. They have a large number of servers across the globe and are able to distribute content securely and effectively. However, they can be very costly in terms of pricing relative to other CDN providers.
Whether you are running a website on a small or large scale, costs always play a role. Besides the price of bandwidths, depending on the specifications, you can have to pay additional fees for added functionality. The advantages and disadvantages should always be weighed when selecting a CDN supplier, but I hope this analysis by Akamai can provide you with more details to make this decision easier. In addition, you can see this list of 5 Akamai competitors before making a final decision on CDN.
