Alibaba Cloud CDN could be the perfect choice for those with complex needs and customers in Asia.
Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud has grown into a cloud computing giant, the largest in China and Asia Pacific (according to Gartner) and ranked #3 in the world. Browse the product list and it’s easy to see why. The company offers an Amazon AWS -like array of enterprise-level services covering databases, elastic computing, security, analytics, networking and more. In this review we’re looking at Alibaba Cloud CDN, a virtual network which accelerates website speeds by distributing your content to 2,800+ edge servers. Most of Alibaba’s network is in mainland China — 2,300 servers spread across 31 provincial regions — but that still leaves 500 distributed across 70 countries, with a total bandwidth capacity of up to 150Tbps, more than enough for even the largest of international corporations. Alibaba Cloud CDN is targeted at experienced business users more than networking newbies, but you don’t have to be an expert to get started. Setting the service up can be as simple as applying a handful of DNS tweaks, routing website visitors to the CDN rather than your own website. Alibaba Cloud then handles the basics all by itself, routing content requests to the visitor’s nearest edge server for the best possible performance. You get other speedup benefits for free. Simple optimization tricks strip out comments, redundant spaces and other surplus content to cut file sizes, smart Brotli compression further reduces your traffic needs, and parameter filtering (ignoring the text after the question mark in URL?parameter=value) makes sure the CDN doesn’t unnecessarily fetch content from your origin server. There’s another potential performance boost in Alibaba’s support for the QUIC, the efficient transport layer protocol which powers HTTP/3. But the company hasn’t forgotten more common networking standards, and Cloud CDN also uses custom congestion detection and packet loss probing algorithms to improve its regular TCP connections. Access control features include the ability to block visitors by IP address, user agent headers, HTTP referrer and more. There’s nothing particularly surprising, but you can still set up some advanced protection schemes, such as using authentication keys to protect access to valuable content (documents, videos, anything you’d like to restrict.
