In this highly-connected world, everything is about speed. People expect data to be at their fingertips in split seconds. Hence, your website must register at blazing speeds to appease your audience and rank high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). After all, you'd want greater visibility for higher traffic, reduced bounce rates, and increased conversions.
As such, you require a top-notch web hosting solution to ensure solid speeds and performance. Most web hosts have included a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in their packages. Some even offer optimized hardware and caching features to boost speeds.
Here are the five best web hosting with free built-in CDN for you to explore:
1. Nexcess
Nexcess is a brand Liquid Web acquired in 2019 and operates as a semi-independent entity. To date, they power half a million websites. They are a digital commerce cloud platform provider targeting small and large businesses, developers, and agencies who create for them. Their core products are WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, and Magento hosting – all managed hosting plans.
Why Nexcess?
Nexcess offers fully managed hosting plans with many premium features to help scale up your online business. The StoreBuilder allows you to customize and build your store via several clicks. There are many free premium features to help extend the functionalities. Nexcess promises 99.99% uptime.
Nexcess comes with a built-in CDN called Nexcess Edge CDN. It stores and serves content from servers distributed across the globe to speed up content delivery. Nexcess Edge CDN helps save bandwidth and gives lower latency by locating the fastest route to the user. It is purpose-built to integrate seamlessly into their platform for hassle-free use with no configuration complexity.
There are 22 edge locations across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, which is good coverage. There are advanced caching features that prioritize the frequently accessed files for speedier access. Connections are optimized across nine regional and global IP Anycast networks so that your users always enjoy route-optimized traffic from anywhere in the world.
Their team is available 24/7/365 via live chat and call. For the more tech-savvy, you can check out their comprehensive knowledge base with tutorials and FAQ. Nexcess excels in its premium managed hosting solutions.
Pricing
Nexcess's WordPress and WooCommerce paid plans start from $13.30/month. However, their Magento paid plan starts from a higher $41.30/month. Each hosting plan has many flavors that differ based on your website's requirements. Of course, you pay more if you need more features and functions.
2. Kinsta
In 2013, Kinsta began with managed WordPress hosting, then expanded to Application and Database hosting. Their focus has always been to help developers and businesses through industry-leading tools. They have more than 25,200 companies and over 55,000 developers as customers.
Why Kinsta?
Kinsta is all about speed and performance, as evident in its innovative and flexible architecture that deploys optimized stack, automatic caching, database optimizations, self-healing PHP, and HTTP/3. Also, there's a free Kinsta CDN powered by Cloudflare for speedier access for your global audience. Their SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee assures.
According to Kinsta, a 44% reduction in page load time is a significant figure. Leveraging Cloudflare's network of over 275 cities in more than 100 countries, you will never worry about coverage issues. Kinsta's CDN provides native HTTP/3 support, which is comparatively faster and has better encryption requirements and performance than its predecessors.
However, if your browser does not support HTTP/3, Kinsta's CDN is backward compatible and will automatically revert to HTTP/2. Also, Kinsta's CDN serves your website's cached content from your primary domain instead of a secondary CDN domain; this makes their offering more scalable in the future. There's wildcard SSL support to encrypt the communications.
You can enable code minification that removes any unnecessary coding elements from your JavaScript and CSS files; this helps with your website's page load time and bandwidth usage. There's the enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection to secure your website too. Kinsta is developer-friendly. Hence, Kinsta could be your choice, especially if you're tech-savvy.
Read our Kinsta review to find out more.
Pricing
All Kinsta's plans come with free Kinsta's CDN, Cloudflare enterprise-level DDoS protection, a built-in application monitoring tool, and multilingual support (English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese). The cheapest is $35/month, and you scale up when you need more.
3. WP Engine
Headquartered in Texas, the US, WP Engine was founded in 2010. WP Engine focuses on WordPress with their cloud-based managed WordPress hosting solutions on the Google Cloud platform. They are trusted by over 185,000 customers worldwide.
Why WP Engine?
If you're a fan of WordPress, consider WP Engine. Their commitment to WordPress speaks volumes of their WordPress-centric offerings. WP Engine's Visual Composer Website Builder, with access to the Visual Composer Hub (free cloud marketplace), makes for easy website building from the ground up.
They decided to migrate their MaxCDN services to Cloudflare by October 2022 due to the more recognizable speed and security benefits afforded by the latter. As such, each plan utilizes Cloudflare CDN. WP Engine's EverCache allows your WordPress website to enjoy blazing speeds. Also, the caching rules are configurable to apply to the Cloudflare Edge network.
The upgraded modern network uses zero configuration – no additional changes are required once CDN is active. Either configure your domain to use Advanced Network (free) or Global Edge Security (GES), a paid add-on option. Both provide out-of-box security and improved performance, including Cloudflare's powerful CDN, Layer 3 and 4 DDoS protection, Cloudflare Polish lossless image compression, and more.
Also, WP Engine's network supports HTTP/3, which accelerates HTTP requests via Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) for encryption and performance improvement.
Read our WP Engine review to learn more.
Pricing
WP Engine is a platform service provider. Hence, their paid plans differ based on resources. The Managed WordPress Startup plan is the most basic at $20/month. However, if you are going for their eCommerce Solutions for Woo, you're looking at the lowest at $24/month. WP Engine being a niche provider can be a good thing, especially when striving for quality and high-performance WordPress sites.
4. WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting was founded in 2013, and its base is in Bulgaria. They are one of the fastest WordPress hosting solutions in the market. The brand also offers free goodies like site speed optimization, unlimited site transfers to WPX, CDN, malware detection and removal, and more).
Why WPX Hosting?
WPX Hosting is all about giving you top speeds for your website. Leveraging site speed optimization and high-spec SSD servers that belong to them with their CDN, these are optimized to give you top-notch performances. They provide a 99.95% uptime guarantee.
WPX has a dedicated Optimization team who analyzes your site to recommend any changes required and for free.
Their HTTP/3-enabled servers reduce latency for improved speeds. Utilizing a combination of LiteSpeed Server, LiteSpeed Cache, and OpCache, it is no wonder they take pride in their blazing speeds. WPX has a custom-built high-speed CDN to facilitate high-performance WordPress hosting. WPX CDN, aka WPX XDN (eXceptional Delivery Network), has more than 30 global endpoints.
WPX CDN is free for all hosting plans. Because they have absolute control over the CDN, they constantly test and tweak it to ensure optimum WordPress performance. The Fixed For You Guarantee means their live chat response is within 30 seconds. Any issues will be resolved for you fast and free. There's also a comprehensive knowledge base for reference.
Pricing
WPX Hosting's WordPress plans start from $20.83/month. Some of you may deem this figure rather pricey, but once you look into the nifty goodies included in this Business plan, you may think otherwise. The great news is that all plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
5. 20i
Headquartered in Nottinghamshire, the UK, and launched in 2016, 20i is the brainchild of the founders of WebFusion (now TSO Host), 123-reg, and Heart Internet. Although relatively new to the web hosting industry, 20i is a force to be reckoned with due to its remarkable range of web hosting products.
Why 20i?
20i shines as a reseller hosting provider yet offers an exciting range of other plans. Its premium shared hosting options include unlimited storage, bandwidth, databases, email, and other resources. Also, their hosting solutions are powered 100% by renewable energy.
20i excels in its innovative in-house development approach, as evident in its My20i control panel, CDN, and Website Acceleration Suite. Their free 20iCDN has premium features that most web hosting providers that bundle in free Cloudflare do not offer.
You enjoy an international market with 20i's global network of servers across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania, and Africa; this is the same infrastructure used by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others. You also get their free Website Acceleration Suite which reduces the data payload of your website, thus accelerating loading speeds.
With automatic image resizing, image compression, image optimization tools, code minification, lazy loading, and more, it is no wonder 20i claims that your pages load up to 48 times faster. 20iCDN affords you detailed CDN statistics to help you make informed decisions on traffic trends and monitor for potential issues. The 24x7x365 support scored excellent ratings.
Pricing
20i's shared hosting plans start at $1.00 for the first month, after which it is at $6.99/per month. You get lots of goodies in this Startup plan but for only one website. Their SSD VPS plans start at $13.99/month for a core. Given their price-feature balance practice, 20i entices almost anyone with various needs.
Final Thoughts – Which Host Offers the Best Build-in CDN?
Any hosting provider on this list is a notable brand in the web hosting space. Thanks to Cloudflare's free plan, every service provider claims to “include a CDN” when they mean their service is CDN-compatible. That isn't a bonus point.
However, Nexcess, Kinsta, WP Engine, WPX Hosting, and 20i go above and beyond. Even those that offer a custom version of Cloudflare recognize the importance a CDN plays to website performance – and so should you.
