The 6 Best CDN Providers for Small and Mid-Sized Websites in 2026

What we actually tested for

A CDN is infrastructure, so the questions that matter are boring ones: what does it cost once your traffic is real, what happens when a bad actor hits your origin, and how much setup time do you need before it works. We looked at six providers with small and mid-sized sites in mind, not the Fortune 500 accounts these companies also chase. One name you might expect is missing: StackPath sold its CDN contracts to Akamai in 2023 and shut down the rest of its business entirely in June 2024, so it is off the list. If a "best CDN" article still recommends it, that article has not been updated in a while.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is the default answer for a reason. The free plan is not a crippled trial: it includes CDN, DNS, Universal SSL, unmetered DDoS protection, and a free managed WAF ruleset, running on a network spanning 337 cities across 8 regions. Standard proxied HTTP/HTTPS traffic is not metered by the gigabyte on self-serve plans, which makes cost predictable in a way pure usage-based CDNs are not. Pro is $20/month billed annually ($25 monthly) and mostly buys you image optimization and extra WAF rules; Business jumps to $200/month annually ($250 monthly) for a 100% uptime SLA with service credits. The catch is that the features that actually move the needle at scale, advanced WAF rules, media/stream, and some Workers/AI usage, are metered add-ons on top of the flat price, and phone support is Enterprise-only. For a small site, the free or Pro tier covers almost everything you need on day one.

Bunny.net

Bunny.net's whole pitch is that there is only one plan and it includes everything. Standard network pricing runs $0.01/GB in North America and Europe, up to $0.06/GB in the Middle East and Africa, with a $1/month minimum regardless of traffic and no separate request fees. A cheaper Volume Network tier drops to $0.005/GB and lower at high volume, but only runs on 10 points of presence versus 119 for the Standard tier, a real tradeoff if your audience is global. Security features (their "Shield" WAF and DDoS protection) and edge compute are included on every plan rather than gated behind a higher tier, and setup is genuinely fast, most of our test zones were live within minutes of signup. If your monthly bill needs to stay near zero and your traffic is modest, Bunny.net is hard to beat on raw price.

Fastly

Fastly built its reputation on instant cache purging and API-driven configuration, historically aimed at mid-market and enterprise customers with an engineering team to run it. That has changed: Fastly's current pricing page lists a genuine self-serve free tier, 100GB of bandwidth and 1 million requests per month for CDN delivery, plus free allowances for edge compute and TLS domains. Beyond that, on-demand pricing runs roughly $0.12/GB in North America and Europe for the first several terabytes, climbing in other regions. Where Fastly gets expensive fast is its packaged "Network Services" plans, which start at $1,500/month, a steep jump from the free and on-demand tiers with no gentle ramp in between. If you can stay inside the free tier or on-demand billing, Fastly is a legitimate small-site option; if you outgrow it, budget for a real jump in cost.

AWS CloudFront

CloudFront's appeal is less about any one feature and more about what it bundles: its new flat-rate Free plan includes 100GB of transfer and 1 million requests a month, and bundles in AWS WAF, DDoS protection, Route 53 DNS, and CloudWatch logging at no extra charge. Paid flat tiers follow the same bundled model with no overage charges: Pro at $15/month (50TB transfer, 10 million requests), Business at $200/month, and Premium at $1,000/month. That predictability is the whole point if you are already running infrastructure on AWS and want one bill instead of five. The tradeoff, in our experience, is that CloudFront's console and configuration model carry a steeper learning curve than Cloudflare or Bunny.net for a team without a dedicated infrastructure engineer, and pinning down exact on-demand per-gigabyte pricing beyond the flat tiers means digging into AWS's pricing calculator rather than reading a simple table.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN skips subscriptions entirely in favor of pure metered billing: $0.04/GB for the first 10TB in North America and Europe, stepping down to $0.01/GB above 100TB, with a $4/month minimum usage charge. The friction point is the account itself, KeyCDN requires a $49 minimum prepay to add credit, which is a real barrier for a hobbyist even though the ongoing monthly floor is low. Three zones are free, additional zones cost $1/month each, and TLS certificates are included at no extra charge. There is no bundled WAF or security suite here comparable to Cloudflare or Sucuri; KeyCDN is a delivery-focused CDN, not a security product, and it is priced and built that way.

Sucuri

Sucuri is the one entry here that is not really competing on delivery speed. It is a security platform first, WAF and malware remediation, with CDN as a side effect of routing your traffic through its network. Plans are priced annually per site: Basic at $229/year covers unlimited malware removals with 12-hour scans, Pro at $339/year tightens scanning to 6 hours, and Business at $549/year runs 30-minute scans with the fastest response SLA. A cheaper firewall-only option exists too, from $9.99/month for a single site. Setup is DNS-based rather than a plugin install, and the WAF inspects all traffic before it reaches your origin, with virtual patching for unpatched CMS vulnerabilities. If your actual problem is a WordPress site that keeps getting compromised rather than a slow page load, Sucuri solves a different problem than the other five entries here, and solves it well.

At a glance

Provider	Entry pricing	Free tier	Best for	Notable limitation
Cloudflare	$20/mo (Pro, annual)	Yes, unmetered CDN + WAF + DDoS	Most small sites by default	Advanced features metered separately
Bunny.net	$0.01/GB + $1/mo minimum	14-day trial, no card	Lowest-cost global delivery	Volume tier has far fewer PoPs
Fastly	$0.12/GB on-demand	Yes, 100GB + 1M requests/mo	Teams that want API control	Packaged plans jump to $1,500/mo
AWS CloudFront	$15/mo (Pro flat tier)	Yes, 100GB + 1M requests/mo	Sites already on AWS	Steeper learning curve
KeyCDN	$0.04/GB, $4/mo minimum	No, but 3 free zones	Small, budget-metered sites	$49 minimum account top-up
Sucuri	$9.99/mo (firewall-only)	No	Security-first, WordPress sites	Not a performance CDN

How to choose

If you just want the safest default and do not want to think about it again, use Cloudflare's free plan and upgrade to Pro only when you need the extra WAF rules or image optimization. If your traffic is modest and your top priority is the lowest possible bill, Bunny.net's per-gigabyte pricing and $1 monthly floor are hard to beat. If you are already deep in the AWS ecosystem, CloudFront's flat bundled tiers keep your infrastructure bill in one place, at the cost of a steeper setup. If your team wants fine-grained API control over caching behavior and can live with Fastly's jump to packaged pricing once you scale, it is a strong fit. If your actual problem is a compromised or repeatedly attacked WordPress site rather than page speed, skip the delivery-focused options and go straight to Sucuri.

Our verdict

For most small and mid-sized sites, Cloudflare's free or Pro tier remains the sane default: it is the only option here that bundles serious security with delivery at no or low cost. Bunny.net is our pick when the bill is the deciding factor. Everyone else on this list earns its place by solving a narrower problem well, not by being a better version of Cloudflare.