In today’s digital world, speed and reliability are crucial for providing the best user experience, regardless of where users are located. A Multi-CDN (Content Delivery Network) strategy leverages multiple CDN providers to ensure seamless content delivery, redundancy, and improved availability across the globe. By using a combination of Akamai and CDN77, you can enhance your website’s performance, reach a broader audience, and maintain service availability even during peak traffic or outages.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what a Multi-CDN strategy is, its benefits, and how to set up Akamai and CDN77 for global reach.

What is a Multi-CDN Strategy?

A Multi-CDN strategy involves using more than one CDN provider to distribute your content. Instead of relying on a single CDN, a multi-CDN approach leverages multiple CDNs to enhance delivery, provide redundancy, and ensure low latency worldwide.

CDNs work by caching your website’s content on servers distributed across the globe, delivering the content from the server closest to your user. A Multi-CDN strategy takes this one step further by incorporating multiple providers, ensuring the best performance and coverage.

Benefits of a Multi-CDN Strategy

1. Enhanced Global Coverage
   Different CDN providers have varying strengths in different regions. A Multi-CDN approach lets you tap into the strengths of both Akamai, which has extensive coverage, and CDN77, known for its high performance in Europe.

2. Increased Reliability and Redundancy
   By using multiple CDNs, you can ensure that if one provider experiences downtime or network issues, another CDN can take over, ensuring continuous availability of your content.

3. Improved Latency and Performance
   With multiple CDNs, you can dynamically route user requests to the fastest or least-congested CDN, reducing latency and improving overall website speed.

4. Better Negotiation Power
   Utilizing multiple CDNs can provide cost advantages. You can optimize traffic distribution based on pricing models, improving cost efficiency for high-volume data transfer.

5. Traffic Load Balancing
   With a Multi-CDN setup, you can balance user traffic across different CDN networks to avoid overloading any one CDN, ensuring consistent performance during peak times.

Why Choose Akamai and CDN77?

Akamai and CDN77 are two of the top CDN providers with complementary strengths:

• Akamai: One of the oldest and largest CDN providers, Akamai has an expansive global footprint, providing exceptional coverage in North America and Asia. Akamai’s infrastructure is ideal for websites requiring high availability and premium content delivery.

• CDN77: CDN77 is a more agile provider with a focus on Europe, offering competitive pricing and excellent performance. It’s particularly popular among media companies and live streaming platforms due to its fast network and optimized edge servers.

Using both together allows you to benefit from Akamai’s extensive reach and CDN77’s cost-effective performance, especially in key regions.

Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up a Multi-CDN Strategy with Akamai and CDN77

Step 1: Sign Up with Both CDN Providers

• Akamai: Contact Akamai’s sales team to create an account. Akamai’s setup often requires a more tailored approach, and they work closely with businesses to determine the best plan.
• CDN77: You can sign up directly on their website. CDN77 has a user-friendly interface that allows you to set up and start caching content quickly.

Step 2: Configure Your Domain for Multi-CDN

You will need to decide how to route traffic between Akamai and CDN77. There are a few popular methods:

1. DNS Load Balancing: Use a DNS service, such as DNS Made Easy or Cloudflare, to distribute traffic between the two CDNs based on factors like latency, geographic location, or failover.

   • Round Robin: Split traffic evenly between Akamai and CDN77.
   • Latency-Based Routing: Route traffic based on latency tests to determine which CDN can serve the content faster for a particular user.

2. Multi-CDN Providers: Consider a Multi-CDN provider like Cedexis or StackPath, which intelligently manages traffic based on real-time performance and can automatically redirect traffic if one CDN is experiencing downtime.

Step 3: Integrate and Configure Each CDN

• Akamai Configuration: Work with Akamai’s technical team to configure caching rules, purge settings, and delivery optimization. Akamai can cache both static and dynamic content, depending on the needs of your website.
• CDN77 Configuration: Configure CDN77 through their dashboard. Set up caching policies for static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript, and configure SSL certificates to secure data delivery.

Step 4: Set Up Failover and Monitoring

To ensure redundancy, set up failover mechanisms so that if one CDN fails, traffic can be routed to the other automatically:

• Health Checks: Set up health checks for both CDNs using tools like Uptime Robot or built-in monitoring features of your DNS provider.
• Automated Failover: Configure your DNS or Multi-CDN provider to detect downtime in one CDN and automatically failover to the other.

Step 5: Test and Optimize

• Performance Testing: Use tools like GTmetrix, WebPageTest, or Pingdom to measure load times from various locations. Analyze which CDN is performing better in specific regions.
• Real-User Monitoring (RUM): Implement RUM to gather actual user performance data. This will help you adjust traffic routing to ensure users are served content from the fastest CDN available.

Step 6: Monitor Costs and Adjust Strategy

• Traffic Analytics: Use both Akamai and CDN77’s analytics dashboards to monitor bandwidth usage, hit ratios, and costs.
• Cost Optimization: Distribute traffic based on pricing models. For example, you may direct North American traffic to Akamai while routing European traffic through CDN77, where the cost may be lower.

Best Practices for Multi-CDN Management

1. Set Proper Cache Rules: Ensure cache rules are aligned across both CDNs to avoid inconsistent content. Always use Cache-Control headers to manage caching at both edge locations.
2. SSL Management: Ensure SSL certificates are up-to-date and configured identically across both CDNs to prevent SSL errors.
3. Real-Time Monitoring: Use a monitoring tool like Datadog or New Relic to monitor CDN performance in real-time, ensuring optimal performance and proactive troubleshooting.