A CDN RFP written from vendor websites gets vendor-website answers. The questions that separate providers are the ones their marketing does not volunteer.
Commercial questions
What rate applies to usage above commitment? Which regions carry surcharges and how large? What are the notice window and renewal mechanics? Is mitigation traffic billed? Can commitments step down as well as up, and on what schedule? Ask for order-form language, not verbal assurances. Order-form language is the recurring theme because verbal assurances have a half-life measured in account-manager tenure.
Technical questions
Percentile latency in your named markets, from real-user data, not network maps. Cache behavior on your actual content types. Time-to-purge globally, measured. Feature parity for the specific WAF and bot capabilities you use today, because integrated does not mean equivalent. On latency claims, one follow-up question does most of the filtering: measured on whose traffic, and may we see the distribution rather than the average? Vendors with real data share it readily; the others change the subject with detectable speed.
One structural addition pays for itself: a scored reference call with a customer of similar size and workload, requested in the RFP itself. Vendors curate references, of course, but even curated references answer operational questions differently than sales engineers do: ask about the worst incident, the escalation that followed, and what they would negotiate differently today. Fifteen minutes with a real customer routinely reweights an entire evaluation. Vendors who cannot produce a comparable reference at all have answered a question too, and it is one of the most informative answers in the process.
Operational questions
Real escalation paths at 3 a.m., named or queued? What does the migration support actually include? Which parts of the platform are self-serve and which require tickets? The answers predict your operational life far better than any demo. Operational answers are also where cultural fit leaks through. A vendor who answers the 3 a.m. question specifically has been asked it by customers who meant it.
In practice
Structure the RFP so every question requires a number, a document reference or a name, never an adjective. Score responses before the demos, not after, because demos are professionally engineered to reorder your priorities. And send the same document to every candidate on the same day: comparability is the entire value of the exercise, and it evaporates the moment the process becomes conversational.
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