The Gist in Two Minutes
KeyCDN is a Swiss CDN provider operating since 2012. 42 points of presence across all continents except Africa. Pricing starts at $0.04/GB in Europe and North America, $0.08/GB in Asia and Latin America. Strictly pay-per-traffic, no minimum payments or contracts. Registration takes 2 minutes, and the first terabyte is free (trial period).
Official website: keycdn.com
What Actually Works
HTTP/3 and Brotli out of the box. Enable in three clicks. Brotli compression saves 15–25% bandwidth compared to gzip — for a site using 30 GB/month, that’s $1.20–2.00 in savings. Small change, nice perk.
Origin Shield. A free intermediate caching layer between your server and edge nodes. If your origin is a $5 Hetzner box while traffic comes from the US and Asia, Shield reduces server load by 3–5×. Tested across three projects.
Image Processing. On-the-fly resizing, WebP/AVIF conversion, cropping. URL syntax: ?width=800&height=600&format=webp. Costs $0.02 per 1,000 transformations. For an e-commerce site with 10,000 products — roughly $0.20/month. Ridiculously cheap.
Real-time analytics in 5 minutes. Unlike Cloudflare, where decent analytics require a Business plan ($200/month), KeyCDN includes them in all plans: request geography, cache hits, status codes, top URLs.
Quick Start
- Sign up at keycdn.com → create a zone → specify your origin URL
- Update your static domain CNAME (cdn.example.com) to the assigned address
- Enable Brotli, HTTP/3, Origin Shield
- Configure expiry headers for your content type
- Done. The whole process takes 15 minutes.
WordPress users get the official CDN Enabler plugin. Everything else works via API and Pull Zones.
Who Needs This
Perfect for:
- Photographers and designers with portfolios (lots of images → maximum CDN benefit)
- SaaS with a global audience and static assets (JS, CSS, fonts, images)
- Blogs and content sites (all static assets on CDN → server breathes easy)
- Developers testing CDN solutions (1 TB trial — basically free)
Not for:
- Sites under 50 GB/month (savings are negligible — just use free Cloudflare)
- Projects needing enterprise DDoS protection (KeyCDN is a CDN, not a WAF)
Affiliate Program
KeyCDN pays 10% of all payments from referred customers for life. Not the first month, not the first year — as long as the customer pays, you earn. A typical enterprise client generates $200–500/month → $20–50/month passive income.
Payouts via PayPal, minimum $50 threshold. 90-day cookie. Referral links and banners available in the dashboard.
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