Most CDN selection guides are provider lists wearing a methodology costume. Choosing well is simpler and harder: seven questions about your traffic, answered honestly before any vendor call.
The questions
Where are your users, really, by revenue rather than by count? What share of traffic is dynamic or API? What breaks, and what does an hour of it cost? Which security features are requirements rather than comforts? What volume are you certain of monthly? Who operates it day to day? And what does your current effective rate actually work out to? The questions are unglamorous by design. Vendors differentiate on the exotic; workloads differ on the mundane, and the mundane is where the money is.
Why POP counts mislead
Network maps are marketing. A provider with fewer, better-peered locations in your actual markets outperforms a bigger map that is thin where your users live. Regional benchmarks on your traffic beat global averages every single time. Revenue weighting changes decisions more than any other single habit. A million light visitors in one region can matter less than fifty thousand paying customers in another, and network choices should follow the money, not the request counts.
A note on who should answer the seven questions: not the vendor, and not one person. The regional revenue answer lives with finance or analytics, the dynamic-share answer with engineering, the outage-cost answer with whoever owns the P&L, and the operational answer with the team that will hold the pager. Selection processes fail most often not from wrong answers but from one person guessing answers that colleagues actually knew. The afternoon this framework takes is mostly the cost of getting four owners into one room, and that cost is the entire methodology.
Deciding with numbers
Shortlist two or three providers whose strengths match your answers, trial them on a real slice of traffic for two weeks, and compare the same percentile latencies per region alongside modeled cost at your volume. The decision usually makes itself; the work is refusing to skip the measurement. Pre-registering the criteria matters because post-hoc evaluation always finds a story for the incumbent, and stories are what benchmarks exist to replace.
In practice
Block one afternoon. Answer the seven questions in writing with whoever owns the numbers, produce a two-provider shortlist from the answers, and schedule the two-week trial before the meeting ends. The entire discipline of CDN selection fits in that afternoon; everything longer is usually procrastination wearing a process costume.
Or skip to the end: the free assessment runs this exact framework on your traffic and hands you the workings.