How to Reduce Your CDN Infrastructure Expenses

Common Infrastructure Expenses

Your first step in optimizing CDN expenses isn’t to look for the best-priced solution but to remember that a cheaper price isn’t always the best deal. A low-cost CDN may not always be as reliable and high-performing as a high-cost one. Therefore, you need to make sure you have the right balance between costs and performance & reliability according to your business needs.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before choosing a CDN:

• How important is the price to you? If price is your top priority, you'll need to decide how much you're willing to sacrifice in terms of reliability and performance.
• What are your traffic patterns like? If your traffic is mostly static, you may be able to meet all your needs with a less expensive CDN that provides content distribution services. However, if your traffic is dynamic, you'll need a CDN that can adapt. 
• What features are important to you? Some CDNs offer features like security and load balancing. If these features are important to you, you'll need to factor them into your decision. For example, if you’re deploying the infrastructure for an e-commerce website, security becomes a fundamental requirement. You will probably look at CDNs that support security payment transfers, security authentications, customer PII protections, WAFs, and more.

Your CDN Bill

Typically, your CDN bill will be calculated according to two types of costs: the costs related to the delivery of traffic and the costs of special add-on services.

• Delivery of Traffic - The costs related to the delivery of traffic are usually tied to your data volume and the geographical region traffic is being routed to.‍
• Add-on Services - Special services can include capabilities like security features (WAF, Origin Shield), resource capping (rate limiting), image/video optimization, and more.

CDN Pricing Examples

1) Amazon Cloudfront’s data routing prices are determined according to amount of traffic and region. For example, the first 10TB to South America cost $0.11.

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Additional special features like Edge Compute or Origin Shield are priced separately. For example, Lambda@Edge request pricing is $0.6 per one million requests. Origin Shield costs $0.009 for 10,000 requests to Singapore.

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2) Fastly’s offers a number of pricing plans. One of them is usage based pricing, which, similar to Amazon, is divided into bandwidth per geographic region and additional capabilities, like security and Edge.

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Tips for Reducing CDN Infrastructure Expenses

Now that you know what your bill is made up of, let’s talk about how to reduce it. CDN infrastructure cost reduction can be achieved by taking the following steps:

1. Optimize CDN Settings to Reduce Costs 

You can configure your CDN to ensure you’re not making extra unnecessary payments. For example:

• Configure the Browser Cache TTL settings to ensure content is saved on the user’s browser,  instead of having to deliver traffic from the origin or the CDN server in a more costly manner.
• Optimize your cache key in CDN to ensure that it includes only mandatory information and avoid duplications (same object with multiple cache keys)
• Segment traffic and prevent unnecessary traffic from being delivered to places it does not need to go, but you are paying for.

2. Transition to a Multi-CDN Setup

A multi-CDN strategy has multiple advantages, like ensuring network redundancy and enhanced performance. When it comes to your budget, an M-CDN strategy is the preferred option as well. 

Negotiate from a Stronger Standpoint

Alternatively, working with multiple CDN vendors opens you up for negotiating with each vendor. When vendors know you have other options, they will reduce prices to ensure you choose to route your traffic through them.

Make the Most from Each CDN

Working with a few CDNs also lets you cherry-pick the routes and services you need from each vendor. This ensures you pay only for the delivery and services you need and you’re not constrained to their services bundles. Finally, when working with multiple vendors, you can choose to split the traffic across different geographies and routes, choosing the routes with the best rates, saving you money on CDN bandwidth costs.

Let’s say Vendor A charges $0.085 for the first 10TB to North America and $0.114 for Australia and New Zealand, while Vendor B charges $0.09 for the first 10TB to North America and $0.11 for Australia and New Zealand.

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If an organization uses a single vendor, they are forced to determine where the majority of their traffic is being routed to, North America or Oceania, choose the vendor that has the lower price for that destination and bite the bullet when they have to route traffic to the more expensive location.

But by working with both vendors A and B the organization can negotiate for a lower price or choose to route traffic to North America from Vendor A and to Oceania from Vendor B.

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3. Create an M-CDN Mix of Standard and Premium CDNs

Not all CDN providers are created equal. Some are standard, offering the basic services you need to ensure traffic routing and low latency, while others offer premium services like advanced security capabilities. As can be expected, premium CDN vendors also charge a premium price.

To reduce costs, you can create a multi-CDN strategy that combines both standard and premium CDNs. Then, build a strategy that determines when traffic is routed through each CDN. Any traffic that can be routed through standard CDNs, should be routed there, at a lower price.

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When should traffic be routed through a premium CDN?

• When you use special services only premium CDNs provide (such as WAF)
• When standard CDNs are down and you need failover. 
• When the standard CDN’s performance is lower than your predetermined threshold (we recommend allowing for a 5% delta)

We recommended implementing a management layer that will automatically detect any failover or performance degradation and can route your traffic to the premium CDNs. 

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4. Capacity Commitment

Committing to a certain capacity for CDNs saves money by giving you a discounted rate on CDN bandwidth and storage. By committing to a certain amount for a year, the CDN vendor provides a discount. For example, Amazon CloudFront offers a Reserved CDN pricing plan that can save you up to 30% on bandwidth.

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5. Split and Separate Static and Dynamic Traffic

Static traffic is traffic that is cached close to the user and stored and served to them by the nearest server. Dynamic traffic, on the other hand, is personalized and served from the origin server. This means they need to be handled differently, in terms of security and performance.

If static and dynamic traffic are both routed the same way, organizations are incurring extra unnecessary costs. This is due to the implementation of unnecessary measures on both types of traffic. For example, static traffic does not require the same level of security that dynamic traffic does. Therefore, it’s recommended to ensure each traffic type is configured separately by using different DNS subdomains.

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Your Next Steps

High CDN costs are not set in stone. By implementing the right practices, you can significantly reduce your CDN bill and CDN infrastructure expenses. Maximize your investment by adopting a multi-CDN strategy, negotiating effectively, and optimizing traffic distribution. Following these tips will earn appreciation from your CFO.

To learn more about IO River, the most advanced Virtual Edge solution for your Multi-CDN strategy, click here.

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** Please note these examples are not exhaustive and do not represent the full pricing list by these companies