Stackpath Review 2021

Advertiser Disclosure

Content is everywhere on the Internet. This includes all the words, images, videos, and files you see. But when everyone in the world is trying to go to the same site and look at the same content, wouldn’t there be web traffic issues? This is exactly where content delivery network comes in. A CDN is a large interconnected system of servers located in data centers across the globe.

It is used for providing web content rapidly to numerous users by duplicating web content on multiple servers. By duplicating content, CDN servers worldwide have a copy of your website’s files, including text, graphics, scripts, media files, documents.

When a visitor tries to load your website, the CDN servers deliver those files from the closest server. Since the content is provided by a server in proximity, loading speed would reduce greatly, which could directly improve customer satisfaction.

In this review, we’re going to introduce StackPath, one of the most popular CDN providers out there. Let’s take a look at its features, pros and cons, plan coverage, and product details.

What’s on This Page

Stackpath logo

Stackpath

4.45/5

  • Free private SSL certificate
  • Customizable edge delivery rules
  • Powerful web application firewall

What is Stackpath?

StackPath is a cloud computing and services provider that has server locations across the world, especially in densely populated cities. This is a strategic move because more densely populated markets mean more end-users, who in turn demand faster and more frequent content delivery. StackPath ensures that users have access to fast, secure, and seamless digital experiences.

Why use Stackpath?

StackPath has comprehensive built-in capabilities that solve big challenges such as content protection and asset optimization. You can also customize and create unique functionality and flows with this software. There are many advantages to using a CDN: 

  1. Reducing website load times. When there’s a server near a user, content loads faster. Since visitors always prefer going to faster sites, they are more likely to stay longer, leading to lower bounce rates.
  2. Lowering bandwidth costs. Using caching and other optimizations, CDNs like StackPath can reduce the amount of data an origin server has to provide, which helps reduce consumption and hosting costs for website owners.
  3. Handling more traffic. When there are more servers available, more content and traffic can be handled, which reduces the chance of hardware failures.
  4. Beefing up website security. Some CDNs provide DDoS mitigation as well as improvements to security certificates, which can help improve security greatly. 

Stackpath Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Great value
  • Free private SSL certificate
  • Customizable edge delivery rules
  • Powerful web application firewall
  • Responsive customer service

Cons

  • Lack of servers outside of Europe and the Americas
  • No image optimization
  • Lack of logging and detailed reporting
  • Minimal video support

How to use Stackpath?

StackPath is pretty easy to set up. After you create an account, select a StackPath service. You can choose from CDN, WAF, DNS, Monitoring, containers, and virtual machines. After that, create a site and select a service to complement this site. Lastly, create or configure a DNS zone. You can invite more users to your account as the final step.

Our Rating Process

To help you make a decision on whether or not StackPath is the right choice for you, we’ve assessed the product based on 4 criteria: setup, performance, features, and pricing. Each of these criteria will receive a score out of 5 points so you know where StackPath stands against its competitors.

Setup –  4.5 / 5

It’s easy to get StackPath set up. After you create an account, create a new site with a domain you’d like to customize. Once that’s done, check out your web dashboard — this is where you’ll see all your CDN traffic and WAF performance. The navigation bar will also show you all the other actions you can take. To make your site more secure, add free private SSL certificates and set an expiration time for cache.

You can also specify backup and origin servers, which is helpful in case your server is ever down.

Performance –  4 /  5

When we look at StackPath’s performance, we have to use a tool called CDNPerf. This tool measures CDN response times based on data taken from hundreds of millions of users daily. It’s a great tool that compares the top providers.

Out of 20 top providers, StackPath’s worldwide response times are ranked at 14th, with an average query time of 37ms. Though, when we look at just North America rankings, StackPath is at 10th place, with an average query time at 34ms — it’s perhaps good to know that the top-ranked Google Cloud CDN’s average query time was at 30ms, so only marginally better.

On the other hand, when we look at Asia where StackPath doesn’t have many servers, the average query time increased to 116ms, making the provider rank 17th out of 20 competitors. Other top CDN providers all managed to load within 60ms.

Features –  4.8 /  5

StackPath has a few features that are worth mentioning. Security measures such as delivery control, DDoS attack mitigation, and SSL certificates ensure your content and operations are protected and reduce the cost of business lost to downtime, theft, and malicious activities.

StackPath’s simple CDN rules engine allows you to set policies and automate unique content and delivery behaviors as well as flexibility. You can also extend your StackPath CDN by building applications on their computing platform and creating cost-effective workflows.

StackPath is big on optimization. Simplify your processes and get your content ready to deliver anytime using GZIP compression, large file segmentation, and canonical header insertion. You can also further optimize your delivery by reducing the burden on origin servers and minimizing origin bandwidth costs. With their real-time reporting tools, you can gain insights into various performance details such as bandwidth usage, requests, delivery by the network, cache hit ratio, request hit ratio, and HTTP status codes.

Lastly, StackPath offers a free private SSL certificate, which helps remove the burden from your origin servers and reduces the performance costs of SSL encryption. You can also connect your network directly to their edge platform — a platform built for large traffic volumes and high-frequency origin calls. This is essentially a high-speed, high-security express lane for ingress and egress traffic. This means less latency and minimal exposure to malicious activities too.

Pricing –  4.5 / 5

For only $10 a month, you get 1TB of traffic and unlimited requests. If you need more bandwidth, simply pay $0.04 per GB up to 100TB and $0.03 up to 1PB. Feel free to add individual services like a web application firewall (WAF), DNS, and service monitoring at an extra $10 a month each.

Although StackPath doesn’t offer a free trial, their simple plans are cheap enough that trying out for a month won’t flatten your wallet. When compared with other providers, know that StackPath is still fairly priced, plus provides advanced features that you’ll need for more heavy-duty projects.

Package Comparison

Product Details

Secure Edge Service

Pro

Business

Price per month

$10

$20

$200

Unlimited requests

Yes

Yes

Yes

Unlimited sites

Yes

Yes

Yes

10TB/mo bandwidth

No

No

Yes

Application layer DDOS protection

No

Yes

Yes

Free private EdgeSSL certificate

Yes

Yes

Yes

Technical / Product Details

Product Details

Specs

Supported languages

Most languages

Compatibility

MacOS, Windows, WordPress

Restricted countries

None. See here for their privacy statement

Customer support

Available via phone, email, live chat, and ticket requests

Frequently Asked Questions

What is StackPath used for?

There are many things you can do with StackPath. First, you can accelerate page loads, video and audio streams, and API interactions to retain users, improve SEO scores, and reduce performance overhead. This will help you create a richer end-user experience.

 

What are the benefits of using Stackpath?

Your website visitors may want to download larger files sometimes, so StackPath is there to help foster fast and reliable downloads of large files like software and game installers, HD and 4K video through advanced features such as segmented file downloading and unlimited file sizes.

Content has to get to the right people at the right time. To do so, use StackPath’s content customization tools to deliver only highly personalized and optimized content to your end-users.

What is WAF StackPath?

WAF stands for web application firewall and is a security component that protects web applications from bad actors by analyzing and filtering HTTP traffic. To put everything into perspective, know that standard network firewalls only operate between levels 3 and 4 in the OSI Model, but WAF can operate up to level 7. Also, WAFs understand web application protocols and can analyze HTTP traffic coming to and from a web application.

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