BunnyCDN is a lightning fast CDN which is affordable for any website owner regardless of the scale to supercharge their website performance, search engine rankings, reliability, conversions, security and user experience. Before getting to know about BunnyCDN let’s look into the generic necessity of CDN for web applications.
Why do we need CDN?
Content Delivery Network or CDN is an innovative method to increase the webpage load time by reducing the distance between the web content severing point and the visitor. Basically, the CDN provider maintains cached copies of the web contents such as Images, Videos, CSS, Javascript files on multiple data centres across the world and serve those files to each visitor from the nearest data centre to the visitor.
As an example, Let’s assume we are hosting our website on a server in Melbourne, Australia. Now a visitor comes to our website from London, UK. In this scenario, the visitor has to negotiate and communicate with a server which is located more than 10,000 miles away from his/her location. This will definitely affect the load time of our website to this particular visitor due to the higher distance. With the help of CDN providers, we can let the visitor to get served the majority of our web content from a data serving point in London, UK. As a result of the least distance to the visitor than the first scenario, the visitor will experience a significantly better load time.
Cloudflare, Stackpath (formerly known as MaxCDN), KeyCDN, Amazon CloudFront and Fastly are the pioneers and major players in CDN market war. Specially Cloudflare is a super awesome service provider which caches the entire website including the HTML, images, CSS, JavaScripts files along with CDN end minification/compression of those files.
The necessity of CDN is crucial for blogs, e-commerce, ad agencies, online gaming or almost any website unless it is being hosted on a website server in a specific country/location where the focused visitors/customers can only exist.
BunnyCDN is a trending CDN player in the town since 2015. It is a very fast, reliable and affordable CDN provider. The biggest pro that we have identified as BunnyCDN users is its simplicity with an elegant and well-organized user interface without lots of jargon. They are providing almost every feature that a super CDN offers their users. Even if you are not a tech buddy, you may master to handle BunnyCDN within few minutes. Let’s dive into the features, benefits and usage of BunnyCDN next.
Benefits and features of BunnyCDN
The biggest benefits of BunnyCDN over other providers are its incredibly cost-effective pricing and super simple user interface/dashboard yet with all powerful capabilities which are required. When we are concerning about the affordable pricing of BunnyCDN, another fact to highlight is the capability of enabling CDN service only for a specific continent or continents as the user desired without paying for the worldwide bandwidth. BunnyCDN is a very SEO friendly and highly secured CDN provider.
The notable features of BunnyCDN are,
- HTTP/2 supported CDN service.
- Custom CNAME hostname under your domain as the CDN URL with one-click Let’s encrypt SSL implementation for free.
- Hotlinking protection for web contents. (Especially for Images)
- Bandwidth overdraft protection to avoid unaffordable CDN costs.
- File compression with Brotli and GZip.
- Instant purging files or entire zones.
- IP blacklisting feature to filter filthy traffic to your application.
- Easy country block, if you don’t want to let your website to be visible for visitors of a specific country.
- 35+ global data centres as content serving points for your web content to visitors.
- Automatic Healing capability or Robustness when an error occurred.
- 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Anycast DNS service
And many more.
At the moment BunnyCDN serving content from 35 worldwide data centres that are located in different cities like London, Amsterdam, Paris, Oslo, Chicago, New York, Miami, Auckland, Bangalore, Melbourne, Bangkok, Tokyo, Singapore and many more as represented below. This data centre number may increase in the future by letting BunnyCDN customers be more closer to their visitors. BunnyCDN has reviewed by many webmasters and SEO specialists as the best CDN for Australian traffic.
Another great feature of BunnyCDN is its detailed logging and monitoring statistics of usage and performance.
Without BunnyCDN vs. With BunnyCDN (Performance Test)
We are going to test a WordPress based website as the test instance without BunnyCDN and with BunnyCDN. The web site is hosted on a cloud server powered by Digital Ocean in London, United Kingdom. We are using supercool Cloudflare DNS as the DNS service provider. The testing tool we are going to use in this activity is the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool. Let the tests begin.
As mentioned above we are testing a website which is hosted in London from Pingdom server in Sydney. According to this test setup, the performance result of this website without BunnyCDN is below.
When we are testing the site with BunnyCDN on the same testing environment. We can clearly see a huge boost of the site speed from 4.23 seconds to 1.80 seconds.
So isn’t that proves miraculous lightning speed promise of BunnyCDN?
Integrating BunnyCDN for your website (Step by Step)
Before all the integration steps you need to create your own BunnyCDN account. They are offering 15 days free CDN service for new users with 1000GB CDN bandwidth. So, Without waiting for more, go to BunnyCDN website and signup now. You won’t get charged in this trial period and there is no need to attach any payment option in this time period. After creating the account please go forward with the following steps.
Setting up a zone for your website in BunnyCDN
Go to “Pull Zone” tab on the BunnyCDN dashboard through the tab menu at the left-hand side. Then Click on “+ ADD A PULL ZONE” button to set up a new pull zone for the website.
After that, you will be directed to Pull Zone Setup. There you have to do a few things.
- Select a Name for your pull zone. This should be a unique identifier on BunnyCDN and the name is used to create the CDN URL which is provided by BunnyCDN as a subdomain of b-cdn.net.
- Then you have to put the live URL of the website in the Origin URL section. In our case, it is https://test.www.nerdynaut.com
It is better to stay in the “Premium Tier”. However, if your site contains large files, “Volume Tier” will offer better performance and discounted pricing as a large scale customer.
You can also select the regions that you want to enable and disable the boost of BunnyCDN in the Zone setup. This is very helpful if your focused visitor group is not the worldwide community. After selecting your desired options, Press the “+ ADD A PULL ZONE” button to create the new pull zone.
The usual next step to carry out is integrating BunnyCDN to your website. But before that step, Let’s see how to use BunnyCDN under a subdomain of your website domain without using the CDN URL provided by BunnyCDN under b-cdn.net domain.
Setting up a custom CDN hostname under your domain (Optional)
Using a CDN hostname under a subdomain of your own domain is a good practice for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and branding. In order to do this task, you can click on “Pull Zones” on the right-hand side tab menu and click on your pull zone name which is listed there.
Now you can see the BunnyCDN given hostname for your pull zone. Under ‘Hostname’ tab, there is the option to add a custom hostname. Before filling out that you should select a subdomain to work as your site’s CDN URL and create a CNAME record to connect your subdomain to BunnyCDN.
You can use any subdomain as the CDN hostname other than the subdomain of the live site. The most common subdomains that are using for CDN are,
- cdn.example.com
- assets.example.com
- static.example.com
After selecting a subdomain you have to go to your domain’s DNS editor and create a CNAME record under the selected subdomain. In the CNAME record, the value should be your BunnyCDN given hostname (example.b-cdn.net) and BunnyCDN recommends to use “3600” as the TTL value. If you are using Cloudflare, you should use the grey cloud to skip Cloudflare caching for the CDN URL.
After creating the CNAME record, you can put the desired hostname on that form and click on the “ADD” button to set up the custom hostname.
Now your custom hostname will be listed under Linked Hostnames. If your site is an HTTPS site you should enable SSL on your custom Hostname by Clicking the “ENABLE” button under SSL. There you have the option to upload your own SSL certification or obtain a free certificate from Let’s encrypt SSL. Please select the relevant option there.
Setting up BunnyCDN on the website
This step is totally depending on the Content Management System (CMS) that your website has been constructed upon. BunnyCDN has released plugins to integrate their service easily on most of the common platforms like WordPress and detailed step by step instruction at BunnyCDN Support Hub for other platforms.
Since our test site is a WordPress based website, we are focusing on WordPress now. Even though there is an easy plugin developed by BunnyCDN to integrate their CDN service on WordPress, We are going to use the caching plugin that we are using on our website to achieve the goal. Almost every WordPress caching plugin like WP Rocket support the CDN integration. In our case, as the user of awesome Cloudways managed cloud hosting, we are using their “Breeze” WordPress caching plugin to integrate BunnyCDN on our website.
The task is very easy. You only need to place the CDN hostname of BunnyCDN in the caching plugin as below. The plugin also allows us to exclude specific files from CDN service when such a requirement occurs.
Verifying CDN implementation
Verifying CDN is also very easy. All you need to do is after implementing all the above steps, just visit your website and view the source of the web page. If you are using Google Chrome, the keyboard shortcut to view the source of a webpage is ‘Ctrl’ + ‘u’. You may see the image, CSS and javascript files are serving from the CDN hostname as below if the CDN setup is accurate.
Best Practices on BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN has not only the basic features that every CDN service offer. The correct way to tell this fact is, BunnyCDN provides all the necessary options to satisfy the CDN needs of the users. There are some options that we can use to take the optimum advantage of BunnyCDN as mentioned below.
Force SSL
If your website is a fully HTTPS site, you can force BunnyCDN to serve content only via HTTPS. You can enable this feature from ‘Pull Zones’ > ‘Your Zone’ > ‘Hostname’ tab. In the Linked hostnames list, you will see the option to enable ‘Force SSL’ feature on your hostname.
Adding Canonical Header
It is best practice to use canonical headers on CDN requests to avoid duplicate indexing issue on google and other search engines as a result of CDN caching. This is a very useful feature for the website owners and managers who really concern about SEO. This feature can be enabled from ‘Pull Zones’ > ‘Your Zone’ > ‘Header’ tab.
Setting Monthly Bandwidth Limit
There is a chance of getting billed as you are not expected at the end of the month as a result of unexpected traffic. If you set a monthly bandwidth limit, BunnyCDN will disable the CDN service at each month if the traffic hits the maximum limit. You are able to set the monthly bandwidth limit from ‘Pull Zones’ > ‘Your Zone’ > ‘Network Limits’ tab.
Conclusion
BunnyCDN is one of the best CDN services out there that offer reliable service for an affordable price. It is very easy to handle and the user doesn’t need to pay a lot of effort to integrate BunnyCDN on their websites. Big web brands or personal websites, BunnyCDN is a great place to anchor for tuning your website to achieve higher performance. Definitely, it is a hassle-free CDN for everyone.