7 Best Hosting with a Free CDN (Feb. 2024)

Content delivery networks (CDN) have been around since the late 1990s. The concept was originally employed to accelerate the delivery of static HTML content for users worldwide. These days, CDNs are valuable tools whenever HTTP traffic is served.

My most memorable moment with a CDN was in college. I had recently published a website I had worked on for months. In addition to being a true labor of love, it was also a class project that was a major part of my grade. I had it hosted at a relatively new start-up hosting company.

Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the entire building housing the servers a few days before the assignment was due. The CDN really saved my tush.

I’m not sure if you’ve endured the heart palpitations and sinking feeling that comes when you think you may have just lost countless hours of potentially irreplaceable work. But my experience tells me that I’d happily engage a CDN to ensure I never encounter those emotions ever again (especially if I don’t have to pay for it)!

That’s why our team has put together this list of options covering the best hosting with free CDN.

Whether your WordPress site houses an online retail business, a blog, or a personal page dedicated to hedgehogs, a WordPress CDN is a valuable tool. Research has shown that drop-off rates decrease and interactions with websites grow when the site speed increases. The CDN’s efficient placement of servers nearer to your user improves the load time of your WordPress website and can result in an overall higher conversion rate for WordPress users.

If you’re selling items on your WordPress site or making money off clicks, using a content delivery network has a quantifiable benefit. If your site is solely informative, you may have an even greater interest in maintaining traffic.

Regardless of your site’s intended use, losing potential visitors before they even reach your page on account of slow loading speeds, downtime from attacks, or a complete loss of content after a hardware failure is unacceptable and altogether unnecessary.

1. Bluehost

Cloudflare brings the best free CDN to all Bluehost users. The full integration makes the CDN easy to use as well. To get it up and running, you simply need to access the cPanel, click “Cloudflare” in the Domains section, enter your email, and click to activate. Free and easy? Sounds pretty good!

It’s also worth mentioning that Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN services and has a reputation to back up that popularity.

Bluehost repeatedly tops our lists when comparing features among web hosting providers. In fact, Bluehost tops our list of the best web hosting services overall. It’s easy to see why!

2. SiteGround

A couple of the most valuable features of a CDN are its added defense against cyber attacks and the backup provided whenever there are system outages. HostingAdvice.com only recommends superior hosting services with the infrastructure and expertise to provide adequate protections to their users and content. Therefore, we name SiteGround as a top choice for hosting with a free CDN.

However, the risks are never zero. Thankfully, whenever there is trouble in paradise SiteGround’s customer support is there to save the day via live chat, ticket, or phone 24/7.

Since SiteGround’s CDN is an in-house product developed specifically for its users, it has a pulse on everything that happens and the fast track to solving any issues that may arise. This consolidation makes integrating SiteGround’s CDN into your website and troubleshooting issues simple and seamless.

SiteGround offers both a free and a premium CDN hosting plan. Whatever you may need, SiteGround has you covered, and its customer support team will be ready to help you day or night.

When a white-glove approach is best, WP Engine has you covered. WP Engine claims to make your WooCommerce store up to 40% faster and 18% better at driving online sales. Stats like that beg consideration when deciding whether to use a premium web host.

If you aren’t sure if premium is the way you need to go or if you are deciding between multiple hosts, you’ll be happy to know that WP Engine offers a 60-day money-back guarantee on most of its plans. There’s no risk in taking it for a spin.

Unlike a traditional hosting provider, cloud hosting does not rely on a single server to contain and maintain data. Providers such as Cloudways uses a network of connected virtual and physical servers to make applications and websites accessible. This interconnection lends itself well to greater flexibility and reliability.

CDNs and cloud hosts have similar benefits concerning redundancy and scalability, but they are not the same. CDNs differ in the expansiveness of their geographic distribution, where the resources for a cloud host can be centrally located.

Since both the CDN service and cloud hosts excel at data redundancy and load distributions, the combination makes for a powerhouse that can withstand heavy traffic and malicious DDoS attacks. The pair makes for an excellent blend equipped to handle data-heavy sites and will ensure that even your largest video files are transferred seamlessly to the viewer.

I go out of my way for one-stop shops on a regular basis. I’m not sure if they actually save me any time or money in the long run, but the illusion is enough to keep me invested. This tendency is probably why businesses like Target are so popular.

GoDaddy is a veritable one-stop shop in the hosting service industry. Need a new site designed? No problem! Want marketing help? It’s on it. VPS hosting? Sure thing! Need a domain? It’s got you. In fact, GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar out there! Of course, CDN services are on that list as well.

By bringing the content closer, the user experiences improved performance of the web service, which facilitates engagement and retention. CDNs also provide security benefits by distributing and diffusing loads in DDoS attacks.

If nothing else, utilization of a CDN ensures that you won’t lose your valuable work due to a hardware failure since your content will be distributed to multiple edge servers, and that alone is worth its weight in gold.

CDNs are an incredibly useful tool, and they also require significant infrastructure. So, it’s easy to think the inclusion of a CDN in a hosting plan would almost always be expensive. Thankfully, hosting companies recognize the importance of a CDN service for their users and many of the best hosting companies have integrated a cheap or free CDN service into their plans.

Don’t be misled, though! Just because they are cheap doesn’t mean they are inferior. The two hosts presented below are also the ones we consider to be our top two hosts overall. Yes, you can have it all! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

We’re getting spoiled with all the premium features these excellent hosting companies provide at no additional cost!

A CDN is a service that employs servers across many locations, typically globally, to store website content and improve the efficiency of internet content delivery to the end user. When a user opens a webpage, the information comes from a nearby cache edge server, or Point of Presence (PoP), instead of the application origin datacenter. This PoP server is typically one of many in a network connected to the origin.

The main benefit of a content delivery network is that it improves the site speed, enabling the content you created to reach your user faster and improve the user experience. It does this by employing a network of servers that cache the content in multiple locations around the globe.

The foundational math is pretty simple. It is intuitive to consider how it takes less time for information to travel from a datacenter in Tokyo to a user in the Philippines than it would take for the same information to travel from your home server in Dallas, Texas, to the same user in the Philippines. That’s a considerable distance, which can greatly affect the website speed!

In addition to decreasing the distance, using the CDN server is also faster and more efficient because it shares the load of those accessing your site. Without a CDN, several people pinging your server at once may affect its performance. With a CDN, the server in Tokyo is likely handling five people, while the server in London is handling another five people, and the server in Toronto is handling seven people, and so on.

An additional benefit includes DDoS protection. In the same way servers share the load for information distribution, they also share the load of excessive traffic and essentially shield the origin server. It is much more difficult to inundate several globally distributed servers than it would be to overwhelm a single server.

Finally, the redundancy of having your website cached in multiple locations can be a real lifesaver if there is a hardware malfunction. You can rest easily knowing that your information is saved elsewhere.

The 2022 International Data Corporation’s MarketScape for Worldwide Commercial Content Delivery Network Services Vendor Assessment makes it easy to identify the best CDN providers. Its assessment of the best CDN providers that offer commercial CDN services globally shows the leaders as Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare CDN, and Fastly. Other major players include Alibaba, Lumen, Edgecast, Limelight, and Tata Communications.

Of these, the Cloudflare CDN service is ubiquitous across HostingAdvice.com, as it is commonly integrated with all of our top hosting providers.

The technically correct answer to this question is no. You can develop a WordPress website and host it without a CDN. The real question is: Why would you want to?

Content delivery networks are inexpensive and easy to access. WordPress hosting combined with a reputable CDN provider can bring considerable benefits to WordPress users.

Navigation of the web hosting industry can sometimes be challenging. The best hosting with free CDN service is easy to find in this article. Additional information about the best hosting service offering CDN can be found in this companion article.

The best hosting options are right at your fingertips whether you need a standard WordPress CDN or will be hosting a major custom-developed eCommerce site.