Even after SiteGround’s CDN 2.0, is it better than Cloudflare APO? My opinion is no.

It has 109 less edge locations, no HTTP/3, barely optimizes images, and you still have to use SiteGround’s DNS to use it which has proven unreliable after Google blocked it for 4 days. This resulted in large ranking drops and customer websites getting completely deindexed in Google.

Why risk it?

SiteGround just wants you to pay them instead of Cloudflare (hence, they discontinued it). It’s the same reason you saw hosts building their own control panel after cPanel increased prices.

Do you really think SiteGround’s CDN is better than Cloudflare, a CDN developed in 2009 with 3,217 employees and 192 Tbps data transfer speeds? I’ll run some tests shortly, but I doubt it.

Siteground cdn slow — Once again, actual results fall short of SiteGround’s claims (source: SiteGround)

1. You Have To Use SiteGround’s Unreliable DNS

You have to use SiteGround’s DNS to use their CDN. Here are the issues:

SiteGround’s DNS got blocked by Google.
SiteGround originally said “there is no blocking on our end.”
They eventually admitted the problem, but blamed Amazon/Google.
They eventually “implemented a fix” but never advised people to move their DNS.
Customers lost Google rankings and some sites got deindexed from Google completely.

The question is, why wouldn’t you just use Cloudflare’s free DNS? It performs great on dnsperf.com. But hey, if you want to trust SiteGround with your Google rankings, go for it.

Status Update: We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience!

— SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 12, 2021

The lack of responsibility you are taking here is incredible. If this was simply Google’s fault, surely other hosts would be facing issues? Clearly something has changed on your set-up that has caused an issue. Are you aware just how damaging this is to many of your customers?

— Kim Snaith (@ichangedmyname) November 10, 2021

You should be advising people to move to an external DNS to resolve the issues if it is causing them massive losses in business. I have just sorted our connectivity issue in around 25 minutes by moving to googles DNS. If you had let us know 4 days ago, we wouldnt be £20k+ down!

— Jon Bunce (@thejonbunce) November 11, 2021

If you move to your Google Search Console > SETTINGS > CRAWL STATS you will, if unlucky like me, see something like this :-( pic.twitter.com/ocBEkWKsaw

— Tristan Haskins (@trishaskins) November 12, 2021

2. 176 PoPs

Cloudflare has 285 PoPs while SiteGround uses Google Cloud’s network with 176 PoPs.

Obviously the geographic distance from these edge locations and users plays a big role with metrics like latency and TTFB. While both have more PoPs than most CDNs, Cloudflare still wins.

Siteground cdn pops — SiteGround’s network page hasn’t been updated yet (see Google Cloud’s network locations)

Cloudflare network — Cloudflare’s network has 285 PoPs and a 192 Tbps

3. AnyCast Routing

SiteGround’s CDN 2.0 uses Anycast which routes traffic to the closest data center and is specifically good when dealing with high traffic volume, network congestion, and protecting against DDoS attacks. It provides higher availability if a node is attacked, overloaded, or fails.

4. Lacks Image Optimizations

SiteGround Optimizer and SiteGround’s CDN do a poor job optimizing images.

One of the biggest disadvantages is they can’t resize images for mobile to improve mobile LCP. They don’t support AVIF, preloading LCP images, adding missing image dimensions to prevent layout shifts (CLS), and they can’t lazy load background images. This is why I recommend using Perfmatters on SiteGround, but resizing images for mobile is usually something your CDN does.

Cloudflare Mirage + Polish support many of these optimizations while others are usually done by your caching/optimization plugin. Bunny Optimizer also supports dynamic image resizing.

	SiteGround Optimizer	SiteGround CDN	Optimole	Cloudflare Mirage/Polish
Compression	✓	✓	✓	✓
WebP	✓	x	✓	✓
Mobile resizing	x	x	✓	✓
Network-based optimizations	x	x	✓	✓
AVIF conversion	x	x	✓	✓
AVIF support	x	x	✓	✓
Price	Free	$7.49/mo	Free 5,000 visits/mo then $19.08/mo	$20/mo with Cloudflare Pro (or included in several Cloudflare Enterprise integrations)

5. Lacks HTTP/3 And Other Features

Cloudflare has a plethora of settings/features not found in SiteGround’s CDN:

HTTP/3
Bot protection
Rate limiting
Page/firewall rules
Analytics
Signed Exchanges (SXGs)
Better image optimization
…among other features (especially on higher plans like Cloudflare Enterprise)

6. Unlimited/Unmetered CDNs Still Have Limits

Just like “unlimited” hosting storage, unmetered bandwidth doesn’t mean unlimited.

SiteGround doesn’t list CDN bandwidth limits, so take this with a grain of salt. RocketCDN advertises unlimited bandwidth but isn’t, since your account will be canceled at some point.

Most CDNs are either usage-based (BunnyCDN + QUIC.cloud’s CDN) or have bandwidth limits (Cloudflare Enterprise on Cloudways + FlyingProxy). SiteGround needs to be more transparent.

7. Test TTFB In 40 Global Locations

KeyCDN and SpeedVitals test TTFB in multiple global locations.

SpeedVitals recommends testing your site a few times to make sure resources are cached and served from the CDN’s closest data center. I typically use the results of the 3rd SpeedVitals test.

8. SiteGround’s Products Have Compatibility Issues

Any time SiteGround launches a new product or revamps something, do yourself a favor and wait to use it. It’s usually full of issues which they usually deny, so I wouldn’t trust their opinion.