Recently I had the opportunity of integrating a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) called Cloudinary with my clients website. I will describe my experience in this blog post. Cloudinary is an excellent Content Delivery Network that can be used to serve static website content such as images, video, audio, HTML, CSS, JavaScript files and more. Cloudinary has an excellent free plan with great features.
Actually Cloudinary supports any type of static content. If you need your website’s static content delivered with high reliability and good performance, then Cloudinary is a good option.
There are a few free CDN services such as Boostrap CDN, CloudFlare, Coral Content Distribution Network and Incapsula. However none of these Free CDN services could meet my requirements. I needed an easy to use Free CDN service that was reliable and had good performance. Only Cloudinary CDN could meet these requirements.
The main issue with other CDNs was that they offered too many services such as web hosting, web application firewall, DNS services etc. These services are usually integrated with their free CDN service and in most cases are offered for free but on a trial basis.
The features of Cloudinary CDN that I found most attractive are that its CDN service is free without any trial limits. Their free plan allows 7,500 images, 75,000 total images, 2G storage and 5G monthly viewing bandwidth. These limits can be doubled if you share their profile on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
I needed a CDN that supported audio files for my WordPress plugin. My plugin allows users to listen to audio translations of Holy Quran verses, so I needed a CDN that supported MP3 files. Cloudinary provided the ideal solution.
One problem I faced when using the Cloudinary CDN was that when we upload media files to the CDN they get renamed automatically. Fortunately Cloudinary has an excellent API with many functions one of which allows us to rename uploaded files. I was able to easily use their API and rename the uploaded images.
While running some performance tests on the website I noticed the images take a long time to get served. I needed a free CDN that was easy to use with WordPress. Cloudinary again provided the solution.
Cloudinary has a plugin for WordPress called Cloudinary - Image management and manipulation in the cloud + CDN that allows easy integration with their Free CDN service and WordPress based websites. Once you have installed the plugin you can easily serve your blog images from the Cloudinary CDN.
Cloudinary is an excellent Content Delivery Network that has many features including image manipulation, free cloud storage, support for all file types, fast delivery, easy to use administration interface, Software Developer Kits (SDKs) in multiple languages and support for security and privacy. It has over 50,000 customers. In my opinion Cloudinary is a very useful cloud service that helps in the creation of innovative services.