The market is congested with abundance of CDNs (content delivery networks), and making a choice sometimes really hard. However, sooner or later you have to resolve on some variant, and, of course, you want to select the best fit for your resources, the fastest and the most reliable network. Good news: with MultiCDN the agonies of choosing are over! New multi-CDN solutions ensure that you always get the best CDN for your website or applications in terms of functionality and performance. Now every image and video resource will be automatically routed to the most optimal CDN on a per request basis. Faster page loading means your users will have better experience and stay on your website longer. In the vast majority of cases, videos and images are the heaviest elements of web pages. Therefore, it’s crucial to minimize media file delivery time. Being a perfect image and video management solution, multi-CDN can help you to optimize resources and boost the quality of delivery. Such network gets resources from multiple CDNs and hundreds of PoPs spread around the world. The reasons why it’s hard to choose one exact CDN service is that each of them has its own pros and cons, which raises some questions. Are they equally affected by traffic spikes? What specific features does a CDN have? And so on. Therefore, some people wonder whether it’s possible to optimize delivery by applying different CDN services for different geographical regions, times of day, and other performance aspects. It’s hard to answer all these questions, but one thing is clear. Many companies could benefit from periodic change of CDN provider or, when appropriate, even using multiple CDNs to ensure perfect delivery times in various regions. However, difficulties with configuration, maintenance expenses and overall cost make this approach almost impossible for all except the biggest organizations. Luckily, some major providers start offering excellent multi-CDN optimization solutions:

• Dynamic multi-CDN switching. In this case, real-time data is used to choose the most appropriate CDN service for every single location and user.
• Smart CDN selection. Customer support agents help to define which CDN service is the best for your project and target audience.

Dynamic multi-CDN switching

Although most CDN providers put emphasis on web performance, there is no evident leader who ensures the best performance everywhere and all the time. If your website or application uses common features that work well on most CDNs, you can make sure that your content is always quickly delivered by activating dynamic multi-CDN switching device. No matter which CDN service you use, URL will stay the same, so you don’t have to solve problems with CDN selection, setup, and dynamic switching: it all is done on the background.

Smart CDN selection

CDN is not only about caching assets and delivering content to your visitors as quickly as possible. Some multi-CDN providers can also render customization options by using data that multiple CDNs capture from end-user’s browser. This includes:

1. The automatic format (f_auto) option helps to select the most optimal format file format for every user applying information captured on the CDN level about which browser requests the file.
2. Resource URLs can become more SEO friendly, if you use private CDN and custom CNames by appending dynamic suffixes to your resource URLs – CDN service can resolve these.
3. When width and DPR values are rendered by the browser via Client Hint headers, they are processed at the CDN level, so you can apply automatic DPR and automatic width and other responsive image features in your website.
4. Multiple CDNs offer various way of purging and invalidation of resources, so users will always get fresh content in time.
5. Some CDN networks provide cookie-based authentication and many other access control capabilities which can help you to define the access to your private videos and images.

It goes without mentioning streaming CDNs that work differently from usual networks and the fact that most CDNs support SSL certificates and HTTP/2. Not all CDNs are created equally, and if your website or mobile application reaps benefits of multiple CDN solutions, you can organize much better content delivery than the others.