Five Reasons Why You Need a Private CDN

Until recently, most users of private CDN solutions have had unique use cases, requiring flexibility and customizability without the costs and challenges of building from scratch or relying solely on public/commercial CDNs. And in fairness, the features of a private CDN, such as custom PoP placement and custom configuration, aren’t for everyone. After all, commercial CDNs deliver what they promise: efficiency and performance in content delivery at large scale. 

Until they don't.

Getting ahead of an internet breakdown

Commercial CDNs are great, but as the June 8th Fastly outage showed, a CDN can be a single point of failure. And that single point of failure can lead to disastrous consequences: lengthy website outages, tremendous loss of revenue and productivity, and very unhappy end users. 

If you don’t need a private CDN for all the bells and whistles of customization, you definitely need a private CDN to build resilience and redundancy in the event of failure. There’s nothing like realizing that putting off backing up your systems because it was “too expensive” just cost you (and your customers) a fortune and a lot of unwanted media attention.

Best of both worlds: Augment your commercial CDN with a private CDN on the side

Whether you’re trying to get ahead of possible internet breakdowns or just want added flexibility and peace of mind, here are five reasons why you need a private CDN either on its own or to run in parallel with your commercial CDN solution: 

1. Redundancy: The Fastly outage showed us how easy it is to be reliant on what turns out to be a single point of failure. Having a backup gives you resilience. 
2. Cost benefit: A private CDN running alongside your commercial CDN will be much less expensive as a risk mitigation strategy than betting against failure and bearing the costs in a worst-case scenario. The private CDN setup can deliver upfront savings, depending on how it’s deployed, and will definitely pay off in the event of an outage/failure. A private CDN is a solid way to safeguard performance and your SLAs
3. Flexibility: Private CDNs are first and foremost flexible and customizable, for example, letting you place PoPs where you want or need them to augment a commercial solution and gain better performance or savings, or serve regional customers better or more comprehensively with local PoPs.
4. Right solution for the task: A private CDN offers a less costly way to handle daily traffic while your commercial CDN does the heavier lifting, managing traffic spikes. 
5. Best of all worlds: A private CDN can work seamlessly alongside your commercial CDN - it’s not either/or, but both, for better safety and redundancy.

Add resilience, subtract costs with Varnish Private CDN

Varnish Private CDN is relied on globally by content providers, news organizations and streaming services, who prize the additional resilience, flexibility and cost control that it provides. Also available as a fully managed service, it combines the benefits of a private CDN with the convenience of plug and play. 

Our expert CDN engineers are ready to hear your thoughts. Get in touch.