Recently, several webmaster friends asked me, high-defense CDN pay per year in the end is not cost-effective, is not really like the sales said that you can save a large sum. To be honest, this problem I stepped on the pit five years ago, when the figure of cheap signed a one-year contract, the results of the second month of business surge, the traffic package is not enough to upgrade the configuration of the money has to be added, simply a blood loss. So today we will break clear, the annual payment discount in the end incense, by the way, pick a mainstream platform of the way.
First pour pots of cold water - annual discounts do exist, but don't be fooled by the words “save 50%”. The core of the cost of high-defense CDN is not in the length of time, but in the hidden items: burst traffic billing, back to the source bandwidth premium, DDoS cleaning threshold. I found that some vendors of the basic package is cheap, but once hit, the price of elastic protection can triple. Last year, I used a “CDN07”, the annual payment price looks attractive, the results of each attack more than 500Gbps on the direct black hole, not even room for discussion.
Why are vendors desperately pushing annual payments? Locker ah! Network security industry is extremely mobile, monthly payment users may compare three or five after running at any time. But the annual user is like a gym card, even if the later found that the cleaning effect is poor, node latency is high, but also can only pinch the nose with the end of the contract. In particular, the high defense service involves DNS switching, certificate deployment and other sunk costs, the migration difficulty is much greater than ordinary CDN.
However, annual payment is not completely out of the question, depending on the scenario. If you are a financial, government class stable business, traffic fluctuations and predictable attack patterns, then the annual payment can indeed save real money. To give a chestnut, CDN5 platform for the annual payment of the user to send free certificates and WAF rules library, down to the equivalent of saving a small two thousand per year. But the game, live such sudden traffic in the industry, I strongly recommend the first monthly payment to test the water, otherwise encounter continuous attacks, flexible billing can make your bill explode.
How much can you save exactly? Take three typical manufacturers and compare them:
CDN5The basic package annual payment directly discounted 30%, but the pit lies in the “cleaning number of times to limit”. Monthly free cleaning only 10 times, after exceeding the 500 yuan / time charge - last year, double eleven a e-commerce station was this clause pit, a single day suffered 30 waves of CC attacks, additional expenditure of nearly 10,000 yuan. The real cost-effective is their enterprise customization package, 300TB/year starting purchase, discounted per GB defense cost of only 0.12 yuan.
CDN07The main “unlimited cleaning”, annual payment for 50TB back to the source traffic package. But the actual test found that their overseas node latency is high, East Asia node average response 87ms, higher than the competitors 20%. suitable for budgetary constraints and the main users in the domestic small and medium-sized sites. Note that their discounts need to be pre-deposited fees, refunded in the middle to deduct 30% liquidated damages.
08Host: A niche but flexible vendor that supports a hybrid billing model. Annual payment for base fee + monthly payment for flexible traffic is the plan I recommend. For example, choose 10Gbps guaranteed protection annual payment (about 12,000/year), sudden traffic according to 1.5 yuan/GB monthly settlement. Compared to the pure monthly payment program, the same configuration can save about 18%, but also to avoid the bill shock when the traffic surge.
Here's the kicker: How do you tell if you should pay annually? I've summarized a crude formula:(Average number of attacks per month x cost per wash) ÷ Annual discount rate > 3 Choose Monthly Payment. For example, if you get hit an average of 8 times a month, and a single cleaning costs $200, with a 30% discount for annual payment, then (8 x 200) ÷ 0.7 ≈ 2,285, which means that the hidden costs after annual payment may exceed the amount of explicit savings.
Be sure to deadpan these details before signing an annual contract:
Finally, a tyrannical theory: these days, even the CDN have to “defense teammates”. Some vendors deliberately fuzzy “defense success rate” definition, intercepted the 99% traffic but the core API request is also mistakenly killed, which is more deadly than no defense. If you really want to save money on the annual payment, why don't you spend some money on multi-CDN disaster recovery? DNS polling to share the traffic, the main node to choose the annual payment of high defense, standby node monthly payment to cover the bottom, both to pressure the cost and to avoid a single point of failure.
By the way, do not believe the sales of verbal promises of “free upgrades”. All preferential terms must be written in black and white into the contract, especially the cleaning algorithm priority, elastic expansion response time and such core indicators. Last year to help my client to recover responsibility, because the contract did not write “5 minutes to take effect within the elasticity of protection”, and ultimately by the vendor to “peak business need to be manually approved” to excuse the past.
High-defense CDNs are essentially insurance services, and paying annually is like buying long-term insurance - betting that the risk won't happen. But the Internet attack trend has skyrocketed year after year, 2023 DDoS peak year-on-year rose 200%, this time flexibility is much more important than discounts. Really want to save costs, I suggest that the budget invested in the source station optimization: good static resource separation, compression of transmission data, with edge computing to reduce the burden, the source of 1TB less traffic than the CDN discounts are much more real.
If you really can't decide, I'll teach you a cheap trick: Pretend to sign a three-year contract and ask the salesman to quote a fracture price. After getting the offer, said “first try a month effect, if good, directly to three years”, usually can rub to the temporary discount price + monthly payment flexibility. Don't ask how to know, back in the day by this trick from CDN5 hand gripped a 20% discount monthly payment package ......
