Alessio Guzzi is a CDN, DNS and security expert at CDN World, the independent advisory that helps companies choose, configure and run content delivery networks.
About Alessio
His work covers the delivery stack end to end: how content is cached and keyed at the edge, how DNS sends users to the right network and fails over when one stumbles, and how WAF, bot management and DDoS protection are tuned to stop attacks without blocking real customers. He benchmarks providers on a client’s own traffic and turns the results into a configuration and a shortlist that hold up in production.
The CDN World team has spent twenty years on both sides of the table, building, selling, pricing and supporting delivery services and then buying them for clients. Alessio writes from that position: independent, vendor-neutral, and with the sources named.
Areas of expertise
- Caching strategy, cache keys and hit ratio
- DNS for CDNs, DNS-based steering and multi-CDN failover
- Edge security: WAF, bot management and DDoS protection
- Origin protection, shielding and offload
- Provider benchmarking and selection on real traffic
How Alessio writes
Every piece is researched against named sources (RFCs, vendor documentation, measurement reports), written from those facts in Alessio’s own words, and illustrated with original artwork. CDN World is independent: no provider pays for placement, and a recommendation to stay put is as likely as one to switch.
Everything Alessio has written
Articles (93)
- Data Sovereignty Became a Delivery Problem
- Post-quantum TLS at the CDN edge: where it already works
- 47-day certificates: what breaks at the 2027 100-day step
- A/B testing at the edge without killing your cache
- KeyCDN vs BelugaCDN: the lean networks
- Huawei Cloud CDN vs Baidu AI Cloud CDN
- Leaseweb CDN vs CacheFly: bandwidth veterans
- Gcore vs OVHcloud CDN: European infrastructure edges
- ImageEngine vs Medianova: media optimization specialists
- Bunny, CDN77 and KeyCDN: when value networks are right
- Cache warming: prefilling the edge before traffic arrives
- Edgio and the Verizon Media lineage: a technical post-mortem
- How resellers get better rates than you do
- WebSockets and gRPC through a CDN
- HTTP/3 and QUIC in practice: measured gains and caveats
- What CDN buyers should budget for in 2027
- Kingsoft Cloud CDN vs Volcengine CDN
- Sucuri vs Myra: website shields at two altitudes
- Fastly vs Amazon CloudFront: the engineering trade
- Akamai, Fastly and Cloudflare: the enterprise three
- Security headers, enforced at the edge
- The CDN renewal playbook: 30% off without switching
- Switching CDN providers without downtime
- What a CDN should cost in 2026
- Brotli, Zstandard and compression at the edge
- TLS 1.3 at the edge: handshakes, resumption, 0-RTT
- Cache-Control: the directives that actually matter
- How to choose a CDN: the seven questions that decide
- Anycast mechanics: BGP as a load balancer
- Multi-CDN: the honest guide
- Core Web Vitals and your CDN: what the edge controls
- When a standard plan is the right answer
- Origin shield architecture: the second layer that saves you
- Per-request pricing: when Fastly’s model wins
- 5xx at the edge: an error taxonomy for fast triage
- The modern image pipeline: AVIF, WebP and edge negotiation
- CDN77 vs KeyCDN: video bundle or pay-as-you-go meter
- CacheFly vs Fastly on throughput
- Gcore vs Bunny: two European CDNs a size apart
- Alibaba vs Tencent: the 2026 POP maps
- Alibaba Cloud CDN vs Akamai China
- Tencent vs Baidu AI Cloud: China’s CDN edges compared
- Huawei vs Alibaba CDN: China’s two cloud giants compared
- Cloudflare WAF vs Akamai App & API Protector
- What the big outages taught multi-CDN buyers
- Imperva vs Akamai security: WAF, DDoS and bots compared
- Real user monitoring versus synthetic tests
- Unifying logs across CDNs: one truth from many edges
- Video CDN pricing, explained properly
- The VCL mental model: thinking in request states
- Single CDN, Multi-CDN, or Renegotiate? A Decision Framework
- DataDome vs Cloudflare Bot Management
- HUMAN vs DataDome: bot management pure-plays compared
- Akamai Bot Manager vs DataDome
- Origin shield: who has it, who charges
- Bot fingerprinting: TLS signatures and behavioral signals
- What DDoS protection should cost
- Cache poisoning: how caches get tricked into serving attacks
- Locking the back door: mTLS and origin protection
- IPv6 and Happy Eyeballs in content delivery
- Prefetch at the edge: who speculates, and how
- Multi-CDN friendliness: who plays well with others
- CDN free tiers and trials: what you can actually test
- CDN support tiers: what a ticket really costs
- Rules engines compared: how much logic before code
- The five video CDNs that matter, measured
- Budget CDNs under $0.01/GB: the honest field
- Image CDNs: the four-way test
- Third-party tags: the performance you outsourced
- Why default WAF rulesets fail twice
- Multi-CDN orchestrators: the market, mapped
- Do you actually need multi-CDN?
- CDN vs object storage: when the bucket is enough
- CDN vs DIY: Varnish, nginx and the honest math
- Anycast DNS providers compared: the quiet dependency
- RUM products compared: measuring what users felt
- Synthetic monitoring compared: the robot fleet
- The LATAM CDN field: delivery south of the map
- The Africa CDN field: the continent the maps flatter
- The Middle East CDN field: sovereignty at the edge
- The India CDN field: scale, localization and the last mile
- The Southeast Asia CDN field: archipelago delivery
- The CDN market map, 2026: one hundred comparisons later
- The RFP questions that separate vendors
- Multi-region origins behind one edge: failover done right
- Edge composition: ESI and its modern descendants
- Akamai review 2026: scale, security and what it costs
- ETags and conditional requests, done right
- Image delivery: formats and edge optimization
- Rate limiting at the edge: algorithms and honesty
- The CDN security buying guide
- Purge strategies: invalidation without incidents
- CDN delivery in mainland China, honestly
Guides (53)
- When your CDN is the outage: an incident playbook
- How to write CDN requirements: a one-page template
- How to version static assets: cache-busting done right
- How to test a CDN you’re not using yet: shadow traffic
- How to size a CDN commit: over- and under-committing maths
- How to read a CDN log line: the fields that explain speed
- How to protect your origin: IPs, headers and private links
- How to plan CDN capacity for the year ahead
- How to implement stale-while-revalidate and serve-stale
- How to estimate CDN costs before you commit: TCO worksheet
- How to design cache keys: the checklist behind your bill
- How to compress at the edge: Brotli, gzip and Zstandard
- How to benchmark CDNs against each other fairly
- Cache-hit ratio: how to measure it and what's good
- How to use Cache-Control: the directives that matter
- How to tune TLS at the edge: resumption, OCSP and chains
- How to train your team on CDN operations: a 30-day plan
- How to steer on RUM data: closing the measurement loop
- How to split traffic across CDNs: ratios, geos, workloads
- How to set up rate limiting: budgets, thresholds, penalties
- How to set up low-latency HLS and DASH without regret
- How to set delivery SLOs: targets your team can defend
- How to set TTLs: a decision tree for every asset class
- How to serve images through a CDN: formats and variants
- How to run synthetic monitoring that doesn't cry wolf
- How to run multi-signer DNSSEC across two DNS providers
- How to run multi-CDN for video: mid-stream switching setup
- How to run delivery for a live event: capacity and rehearsal
- How to run an annual delivery review: the full-estate audit
- How to run a CDN free trial properly: a 14-day test plan
- How to read your CDN invoice: every line item decoded
- How to raise cache-hit ratio: ten levers in order of impact
- How to put a CDN in front of WordPress without breaking it
- How to prepare delivery for a traffic spike: the checklist
- How to pick QoE metrics for video and wire them to alerts
- How to migrate between CDNs: the reverse cutover playbook
- How to lock down your origin with mutual TLS (mTLS)
- How to handle user-generated content delivery safely
- How to handle certificates on a CDN: renewal and automation
- How to forecast CDN spend: three methods that work
- How to fight rebuffering: diagnosis and fixes in order
- How to document your delivery estate on one page
- How to deploy RUM: beacon, sampling and dimensions
- How to decide if you need multi-CDN: the honest scorecard
- How to cut your CDN bill this quarter: ten levers, ranked
- How to configure VOD delivery: packaging, tokens and TTLs
- How to configure DNS for a CDN: CNAME, apex and TTL choices
- How to cache HTML safely: rules for pages that change
- How to add edge compute without locking yourself in
- How to CDN your API: what to cache, what never to
- Delivering into mainland China: licenses, options, timelines
- Choosing a CDN for video streaming: what actually matters
- CDN migration: the zero-downtime cutover checklist
Comparisons (6)
- Cloudflare vs AWS CloudFront: Which CDN Fits You?
- Bunny.net vs Fastly: Cheap Bandwidth or Programmable Edge?
- Akamai vs Fastly: Which CDN Fits Your Traffic?
- Akamai Bot Manager vs Cloudflare Bot Management
- Gcore vs CloudFront: AWS-Native Breadth or Edge AI?
- CDNetworks vs CloudFront: APAC Reach or AWS Gravity?
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