Recently, I helped a few game projects to choose a high defense CDN, the market mainstream service providers raked the bottom of the sky. It turned out that the water inside is much deeper than imagined - some vendors shouted “game exclusive protection”, the actual even TCP acceleration did not understand; there are shared bandwidth posing as a dedicated line, the player card into a PPT before responding to the pit.
First of all, a real case: a small and medium-sized game company before the cheap map with a “cost-effective” CDN, the results of the day of the opening service was 20G traffic directly through. The boss called me in the middle of the night to ask me how to do, I look at the console can not log on - the original so-called “unlimited protection” is actually a black hole strategy, more than the threshold directly pull the gate for half an hour. These days even the CDN have to prevent teammates, you say outrageous not outrageous?
The core metric for gaming CDNs is not bandwidth price at all. I found that at least four points to focus on: TCP link optimization quality, DDoS cleaning accuracy, global node latency balance, and the most critical - burst traffic response mechanism. Many vendors“ package pages hide this critical information in the corner, but instead use the gimmick of ”1T of traffic for only $XXX" to attract white people.
Let's look at CDN5“s gaming packages. Their main ”Anycast + TCP unilateral acceleration", North American nodes measured latency control within 80ms. The price is divided into three grades: the basic version of 2000 / month to protect 20G protection, enterprise version of 8000 / month with 50G protection + intelligent scheduling, the flagship version of the direct volume billing. I suggest that the enterprise version of the start, because their intelligent routing is really powerful - last time a customer was 300G SYN Flood attack, automatically switched to the Dutch cleaning center when the player is completely imperceptible.
The focus is on the configuration example (copywork time):
Then look at CDN07“s tawdry operation. They advertise ”free game protection", but their traffic packages are ridiculously expensive - $0.12 per GB in the Asia-Pacific region, which is 1.5 times that of CDN5. But I must admit that their WebSocket optimization is really great, especially for real-time battle games. I've been testing a game called "Wasteland" on the Tokyo node, and the latency fluctuation during a 200-player same-screen battle was no more than 5ms.
But don't believe in their “unlimited protection”! I had my test team simulate 7 types of CC attack patterns and found that their free version started dropping packets at 150,000 QPS. If you want real protection, you have to buy the “gaming exclusive package”: 6,000 per month to start, to 50G precision cleaning + game protocol depth recognition. To be honest, this price is not as good as adding money to CDN5.
Recently emerged 08Host is very interesting. Startups but the technical team from Aliyun and Cloudflare, focusing on “edge computing + security” convergence architecture. The price of the butcher is true to its name - 100G protection + 10TB of traffic per month as long as 2999, almost half of the peer. I have disassembled their node deployment, with used IBM servers + self-developed hardware and software programs, cost control is really hard.
But there is always a price for cheapness: their North American nodes have low coverage, and the Miami server room actually goes on Level 3 lines. When testing the Call of Duty US service, I found that the evening peak jitter is obvious, and I need to manually configure the routing weights:
It's the burst traffic handling that is the demon-spotting mirror. Some vendors look cheap and charge 1-2 bucks per GB for excess traffic (talking about the international version of SomeriCloud). Really conscientious like CDN5 using 95 billing method, and 08Host allows a burst of 500% bandwidth without charge. Once helped a certain SLG game to do stress testing, instantly burst 200G traffic, the final bill was 60% less than expected.
Hidden costs are even worse: the number of SSL certificates, log analysis functions, the number of API calls, all these details can pit money. A well-known vendors even charge “traffic cleaning fee” - each time the DDoS also pay an additional thousand dollars in service fees. It would be better to choose CDN07's annual package, although the total price is high, but includes all the hidden services.
Give the ultimate advice: large competitive games directly on the CDN5 enterprise version, do not save the thousands of dollars. Small and medium-sized teams with 08Host cost-effective, but remember to buy the Asia-Pacific optimization package. If it is a global service project, simply use CDN07 multi-line BGP, although expensive, but latency and stability no black.
Finally dump a real-world data table (in milliseconds):
In fact, selecting CDN is like matching equipment - there is no absolute God's clothing, only the most suitable match. The key to remember three points: the actual test delay is more important than the quotation, cleaning ability to look at the actual fight do not look at the text, excess flow terms must be reviewed verbatim. After all, players will not care about how expensive CDN you use, they only care about can not smooth black.
