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CDN Provider Performance Monitoring: Best CDNs in Russia
In this blog, we’ll be continuing our series on best-performing CDNs by country. Today’s focus is on Russia. This analysis compares CDN performance and RUM uptime metrics grouped by data sources within the last seven and 30 days of this writing.
First things first:
What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
A CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers designed to improve the speed of web content delivery and reduce latency. When using a CDN, queries are routed to a resource closest to the end user’s location. Since the physical distance between your content and your users is closed, the time it takes for content to appear on a user’s screen after making a web page request is decreased or appears immediately. Any website or application that offers dynamic content such as video and images to a global audience is likely using a CDN, if not more than one.
What is Multi-CDN?
Multi-CDN is when a company uses more than one CDN. This is beneficial for several reasons. CDNs do provide a noticeable performance boost, but they are also vulnerable to service degradation and outages. When using multiple CDNs, speed and latency see even greater improvements as you have more than one CDN serving content to your users. Vulnerabilities are also greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely, due to the added redundancy.
H2 Online Market Trends and Consumer Behavior in Russia
The Russian economy is the 11th largest in the world and contributed $1.48 trillion to the global GDP in 2020. (Investopedia). s According to Statista, Russia’s GDP is projected to climb steadily through 2026, when it is projected to reach over 1.9 trillion. While its overall economy isn’t as large as other nations, Russia has a vibrant, rapidly growing online user base. In 2020, 85% of the country’s 145 million residents were internet users—an increase of 22 million users since 2015.
E-commerce in Russia is really flourishing. While still in its early stages, its online economy growth rate is five times faster than its physical economy (Bne Intellinews). Due to its size and sparse regions, online shopping is predicted to play a critical role for areas where there are limited physical shopping choices.
Along with e-commerce growth, the use of social media and online entertainment is also on the rise. As of 2021, there were 99 million social media users in Russia, an increase of just over 5% or 4.8 million people over the span of one year (Datareportal).
With such a fast-growing online market, internet speed and availability will be key. As e-retailers, social media, gaming, and entertainment sites serve media-rich content, top-performing CDNs play a large role in your website’s success.
Did you know?: We added 7 monitoring nodes in Russia so that businesses and CDN providers have access to even more precise metrics and greater insight into CDN performance.
How Does PerfOps Work?
Before we get into the CDN speed comparisons, let’s take a look at how we get our data and measurements. Performance metrics are based on real user metrics (RUM) from internet users around the world. PerfOps, as well as our free performance monitoring service CDNPerf, analyzes over 300 million tests per day, with data updates occurring on the hour. Measurement is based on a 2,500-millisecond timeout limit. If a query takes longer than this, we consider it a timeout. Performance is measured according to how long it takes for a user to download a 500-byte image from a prospective CDN.
Best CDNs Russia: CDN Speed Comparison
Now let’s deep dive into the data! The graph below shows the CDN performances of the top 10 performing CDNs in Russia (averaged over the last 30 days).
Provider Speeds (milliseconds) within last 30 days
G-Core Labs 21.65
CacheFly 36.52
5scentsCDN 38.32
CDN77 39.68
Azure 42.32
Cloudflare 43.48
CDNetworks 44.48
BunnyCDN 46.13
ArvanCloud 46.16
Google Cloud 47.39
This data not only tells us which CDN is fastest on average, but also shows the stability and fluctuations over the last 30 days. An interesting point of this particular set of analytics is 5scents, who ranked 3rd overall in performance. However, they were also less consistent, with large fluctuations in speed between January 16 and January 18.
What this tells us is that either the higher speeds were an anomaly or at that time, one or more of 5cents servers were experiencing issues. PerfOps can actually help you pinpoint what or where the problem is. We supply the raw data logs and also have an excellent traceroute tool for even greater precision troubleshooting.
Here is a look at how our raw data tables look and the information you will find, including time, MS, CDN, User IP, User Agent, Continent, Country, City, ASN, and ISP:
You can also view more data, by selecting View under the RAW column:
Now let’s look at the same providers, but within the last seven days.
This gives you an even closer look at performance in a shorter window of time. And while similar, CDN performance shifted slightly. When analyzing the same providers in the last seven days, these are the results:
Provider Speeds (milliseconds) within last 30 days
G-Core Labs 23.5
5scentsCDN 25.25
CacheFly 37.25
CDN77 40.63
CDNetworks 42.5
Azure 43.63
Cloudflare 45
ArvanCloud 47
Google Cloud 48.13
BunnyCDN 50.75
G-Core still leads the pack but saw a slight increase in speeds. CacheFly and 5scents swapped places, BunnyCDN fell from the 8th spot to last, while CDNetworks jumped up two spots up. This may not seem like much, but considering just a one-second delay in page load times can result in a 7% loss in conversions, keeping up with your CDN(s) performance is vital for maximizing ROI.
Best CDN Uptime in Russia
Another crucial aspect when it comes to monitoring CDNs is uptime. After all, if a CDN is down, your content isn’t being served to your visitors. In this example, we’ll be using the same providers from the above examples, but we’ll be analyzing them by RUM uptime (Russia, last seven days).
Provider Uptime (within last 7 days)
Cloudflare 99.19%
Google Cloud 99.05%
BunnyCDN 99.04%
CacheFly 98.98%
Azure 98.84%
5cents 98.48%
ArvanCloud 98.46%
G-Core Labs 98.23%
CDN77 98.18%
CDNetworks 77.74%
When comparing CDNs by RUM uptime, there are significant differences in how the CDNs rank. Cloudflare, which held the 7th spot in speeds within the last seven days comes in first place for uptime. Google Cloud also performs better in uptime than it did in speeds, while the faster providers had lower uptime.
In our seven-day analysis, CDNetworks had noticeably lower uptimes than all the other providers. Let’s check how they faired over a longer period of time, which can give more insight into their overall performance.
When compared over 30 days, we see that CDNetworks’ performance was 92.97% overall, but we also see where their performance starts to dip (yellow line). Starting on January 28, their uptime fell to 89.6%, and on February 1, to 74.93%. We also see a drop in RUM uptime for 5scents between January 6 and January 17. Their lowest was on the 15th, at 13.66%, but by the 18th, they were back on track, at 98.99%.
This data is highly valuable as it allows companies and providers to track uptime and performance, as well as pinpoint issues and areas that need improvement.
Tip: Keep in mind, these analytics are based on RUM data, and don’t reflect the actual uptime of a provider. Some false positives can occur, but overall, this gives you the best picture of CDN stability and reliability during a specified time range.
Multi-CDN Solution For Best Performance and Uptime
As the examples above demonstrate, CDNs vary in uptime and speeds. Relying on only one can sometimes be problematic, especially if your domain runs mission-critical services or offers high-in-demand products and services. Due to consumer expectations, it is best practice to have multiple CDNs. The problem with this is that managing multiple CDNs can be tedious. However, there are Multi-CDN solutions that solve this issue.
Two notable services are:
The Best CDN: Performance Monitoring is Key to Success
As Russia is one of the fastest-growing online markets in the world, CDNs are a critical resource for domain owners. It is equally important to monitor CDN performance and uptime frequently to ensure optimal performance and user experience. With PerfOps or our free product CDNPerf, your business can compare and analyze provider data for yourself so that you can choose which CDNs best suit your needs. The data can also be used to ensure CDNs are meeting quality expectations and to help you negotiate commits.
CDN Providers can use PerfOps to compare their performance to other providers, troubleshoot their network, identify underperforming nameservers that may be affecting the overall performance of their services, and more. PerfOps is a trusted source that provides highly accurate, unbiased DNS, CDN, and Cloud metrics for domain owners and providers.
Don’t just take our word for it. Try it for yourself!
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