The company Akamai Technologies was founded in 1998 and has its headquarters in Cambridge (USA). With around 300,000 servers in 136 countries, Akamai is one of the largest CDNs on the market. In addition to thousands of well-known companies such as Apple, BMW, Facebook, Red Bull and Microsoft, a large number of institutions also use the cloud provider, including the German Federal Chancellery, NASA and the US Army.
Deployment of Akamai
Akamai offers products for different purposes and with "Akamai NetSession Interface" has a software that is automatically installed with many programs. This is the case, for example, with the racing game Need for Speed and the image editing program Photoshop. Akamai contributes here to the acceleration of downloads as well as the faster loading of videos. The CDN provider is already widely used in the music industry. Billions of songs have already been sold via the Akamai platform.
Advantages and disadvantages of Akamai
Akamai is one of the most popular CDN providers for a reason and the main reason for that is the high server density. About 85% of global internet users are within network range of an Akamai server. The technology is powerful and can handle complex demands. For more than 20 years, Akamai Technologies has continued to innovate, even earning mentions in academic journals. From a price point of view, Akamai is not a bad option, since - although the CDN is rather in the upper price segment - there are many cheap tariffs and the basic package is even free. Every day, over 100 terabytes of traffic are provided per second
Customer security is a major priority for the provider. Security services such as web application firewalls offer protection against cyber attacks and with Prolexic, Akamai even has the first global cloud-based DDoS defense service. However, many of the aforementioned benefits come with a high level of technical complexity, which makes the CDN provider relatively demanding. Due to the fact that the servers are located in the USA, using Akamai can also lead to disadvantages in the area of SEO. The biggest disadvantage, however, is the fact that there is no online office. Especially for companies that value close digital collaboration, this can be annoying. Nevertheless, Akamai is one of the best positioned CDN providers, which is largely due to the performance offered.
Akamai costs
Akamai offers a growth-based billing model, which is why the CDN can also be worthwhile for companies with little data traffic. Moreover, it is one of the providers with a free basic package. Since there are different tariffs, companies should obtain a price quote from the provider before using it.
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