BunnyCDN Review: How it Speeds Up Your Website Load Times

If you are looking for a CDN that will not cost you a fortune, then you should consider BunnyCDN. I have been using it for more than a year now. In this review, I will show you how it has helped me in making my site faster while saving a lot of bandwidth.

We will also discuss the important features and do some speed tests.

Initial Impressions

After starting this blog in 2019, I was looking for an affordable content delivery network. I had heard a lot about Cloudflare, Stackpath, and KeyCDN, but BunnyCDN was a new name to me.

So, I was a bit skeptical at first. After looking at the figures on CDNPerf, I decided that it’s worth a try.

Features & Ease of Use

BunnyCDN offers all the important features you expect from a typical CDN.

1. Edge Locations or PoPs

With 41 data centers spread across 28 countries, BunnyCDN has its presence on six continents. Here is a continent-wise breakdown of the number of data centers or edge locations:

• North America – 11
• South America – 1
• Europe – 13
• Africa – 2
• Asia – 8
• Oceania – 6

2. Pull Zones

A pull zone allows you to set the base URL from where the CDN should cache the files.

Configuring a pull zone involves two URLs:

• Origin URL
• Hostname or CDN URL

So, whenever a request hits a Hostname, the CDN checks if the file is available in the edge cache. If not, it pulls the file from your origin server and sends it to the user.

After that, it saves that file on the edge location’s cache for future request. Thus, the next visitor from that region gets served faster.

Creating a Pull Zone

Let’s see how you can create a pull-zone for your website. After signing up and logging in, head over to the Pull Zones page and click the Add Pull Zone button.

On the next page you have to set three things:

1. URLs – Hostname & Origin – Give your site’s name as the hostname. For the Origin URL, enter your site’s domain. Alternately, if you want CDN on a certain folder only, add that to the domain name (eg., mysite.com/images).
   
   Note: You can have multiple pull zones for different directories of your site. For example, you can set one pull zone for mysite.com/images while another one for mysite.com/assets
2. Standard or Volume Tier – Standard is the default choice. Keep it like that for most use cases.
3. Prizing zones – Keep all the four zones checked if your visitors scatter all around the globe. Otherwise, you can uncheck any unnecessary zones.
   South Africa and South America zones are more expensive than the other two. So, disabling it can reduce your monthly bills slightly.

Standard & Volume Tiers

BunnyCDN offers two types of Pull zones – Standard and Volume. Standard will be the best option for most sites.

Volume tier is specially optimized for caching large files like videos. However, it is available on certain edge locations only (see the image above).

Finally, click the Add Pull Zone button to activate the newly added zone.

After that, you will see an instructions page describing the methods to integrate the Pull Zone with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or an HTML website.

Note down the URL of the newly created pull zone (looks like ****.b-cdn.net).

Then click on the Skip Instructions button to go access the Pull Zone’s Edit page.

3. Custom Domain with Let’s Encrypt SSL

Above, we have seen that the default URLs for your assets will be *.b-cdn.net. But with BunnyCDN’s Linked hostnames feature, you can connect your custom sub-domain to it and serve the cached assets from that subdomain. So your visitors won’t see BunnyCDN’s third-party URLs.

The default Hostname looks like:

yourpullzone.b-cdn.net

With CNAME sub-domain support, you can set something like:

cdn.yoursite.com

Adding the CNAME DNS Record

Before entering the sub-domain on BunnyCDN’s dashboard, you have to add the CNAME record from your domain’s DNS provider.

Open your domain’s DNS in a new tab. Then create a CNAME record and point it to the BunnyCDN URL you’ve got in the previous step (****.b-cdn.net). Enter an appropriate name for the host field (eg., cdn)

If you are confused about adding a CNAME, see this guide on GoDaddy. The process is similar for most providers.

Now, your sub-domain (cdn.yoursite.com) is pointing to ***.b-cdn.net.

Enter Subdomain as Hostname

Now, come back to your pull zone’s edit page on BunnyCDN. Under Add Custom Hostname, enter the new subdomain and click Add.

Now, the sub-domain appears under Linked Hostnames.

Enabling SSL for the new Subdomain

BunnyCDN offers one-click Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for sub-domains. If you wish, you can add a custom certificate from another authority also.

4. Storage Zones

With the pull zones we discussed above, you have don’t have full control over the data stored on them. That means, pull zones retrieve data from your origin server when required.

Whereas with Storage Zones, you can permanently store data on BunnyCDN’s servers. To upload files to such a storage, you can use one of the following ways:

1. Upload via the web interface
2. FTP upload
3. via BunnyCDN API

For backups and archiving purposes that don’t need public access to the files, it is sufficient. In addition, if you want to serve the files to your users from a public URL (like in a pull zone), you can do that too. Connect a pull zone (yes, pull zone), and set its origin URL to the Storage zone.

• In short, a Storage zone connected to a pull zone works like Push CDN (similar to Amazon’s S3 storage connected to Cloudfront CDN).

The storage zones also supports geo-replication, which increases redundancy and reduces latency. Currently, replication is availabe in the following locations:

• Los Angeles
• New York
• Falkenstein
• Singapore
• Sydney

• The pricing is also quite cheap – $0.02 or $0.03 per GB per location per month depending on the replication zones you select. If you select all the five locations, the total price becomes $0.11/GB/month.

You might also like:

• Top 10 Amazon S3 Alternatives

5. Perma-Cache & Origin Shield

With normal CDN caching, the assets in your pull zone’s edge locations expire after a set time. After that, the edge servers re-pull those assets from the origin server once again.

However, BunnyCDN has a new feature that allows storing the assets permanently on their servers. Perma-cache.

To enable it, you have to create a Storage Zone and connect it to your Pull Zone. Once enabled, the connected storage zone stands in between the edge servers and your origin server. It caches every request and stores it permanently.

So, when the cache expires on an edge server, it pulls from the storage zone instead of your origin server.

With replication, the edge servers pull from the nearest replication location. So, for expired cache files, the latency will be lower.

Overall, storage zones combined with perma-cache is a great way to reduce the load on your server while making the site load faster.

6. Origin Shield

Origin shield is another feature that is quite similar to Perma-cache. So, you should activate only one at a time.

With the origin shield, the request to your origin servers will only pass through the shielding server. However, unlike Perma-cache storage zones, the shield locations do not cache files permanently.

7. Statistics & Monitoring

Ability to know the usage statistics is a must-have for CDNs. With Bunny, it’s easy.

At the top of your pull zone page, you can see the three important metrics – bandwidth, requests, and cache hit rate.

Usually, your cache hit rate should around 70% or more. It may be lower during the initial days. But as more and more edge locations start caching your files, the rate should climb up.

In addition to this, the Statistics page show detailed information with line graphs and maps. You can filter metrics by date, location, and pull zone.

Apart from Statistics, the Logs section gives the details of each individual request. It includes HTTP status code, user’s IP, data center, and browser info. Looking at the logs can help to figure out problems easily.

Integrating with Your Website

In the above section, we have discussed how you can create a pull zone. Now let us see how you can integrate it with your website.

Replacing links on your site

For the CDN to start caching, you have to replace the origin URLs with the new pull zone URLs.

Integrating with WordPress

With BunnyCDN’s WordPress plugin, integrating and enabling CDN is quite easy.

The first step is installing it from the WP dashboard.

After installing it, go to the settings page of the plugin. If you hadn’t set a custom sub-domain, just enter your pull zone’s name and click Enable.

Otherwise, if you had set a sub-domain as per the previous steps, click Switch to Advanced View.

Enter the sub-domain and click Enable.

Now, all settings are complete. Open your site and inspect one of the assets to ensure that you are seeing the new CDN URL.

Note: Be sure to purge any cache after enabling CDN. Otherwise, the old links can stay without changing.

Speed Tests – Before & After

A CDN is all about performance. So, what is the point of this review without some tests?

Test 1: Using sample HTML pages

For this test, I created two identical web pages.

On one, the assets (images, CSS, JS, and fonts) were loaded from the origin server (DigitalOcean). On the second, the assets were loaded from BunnyCDN.

Then I conducted multiple tests from multiple locations using GTMetrix to find the average page load times for each location as well as worldwide average.

These were the results:

As you can see, using BunnyCDN improved page speed by almost 37% (average). Somehow, South America (Sao Paulo) was slower with BunnyCDN.

Test 2: Using a WordPress site

Using demo sites for testing was enough to get an idea. However, since WordPress is so popular, that’s what most people want to know – how BunnyCDN speed up WordPress?

So I chose a WordPress site that was not well optimized. It also contained a few large images – perfect for testing a CDN.

These were the results:

• Average load time without CDN – 2.9s
• Average load time with BunnyCDN – 1.6s

With WordPress, BunnyCDN showed even better results with a 44% gain in speed. It confirmed the results from the previous test.

Also, according to the data from CDNPerf, it is faster that Stackpath and KeyCDN.

Pricing

Affordable pricing is the main attractiveness of BunnyCDN. They also give a 14-day trial.

The price per GB starts at $0.010, which is one of the lowest among CDNs.

The payment is in the form of recharges.

That means, if you recharge your account with a certain amount, you need not pay again until that money is fully spent.

So, your credit card won’t be charged monthly. The minimum recharge amount is $10 though.

Currently they accept credit card and cryptocurrencies.

Support Options

Currently, support tickets are the only way to request help. The account says that more options and a Clack channel are coming soon. They often post on Twitter with the latest news and for feature suggestions.

Apart from that, their knowledge base articles cover almost all topics related to Account setup and CDN configuration.

I haven’t faced any glitches during the journey with them for the last three months. So, there wasn’t any need to contact the Support.

Pros & Cons of BunnyCDN

These are the advantages and disadvantages I felt after using BunnyCDN.

Pros

• Affordable
• Above average speed and response times worldwide
• Easy to Set Up
• User-friendly dashboard

Cons

• Support options are less
• Slower when tested from South America

Conclusion – Do we recommend BunnyCDN?

Absolutely. If you are searching for a CDN with a low price tag and great speed, you should consider BunnyCDN. Regarding the cons, I honestly couldn’t find anything serious.

Try BunnyCDN for free

Do you use BunnyCDN? What is your experience? Share it in the comments.