Bart Pluskota is a CDN, DNS and security expert at CDN World, where he advises companies on choosing, pricing and running content delivery networks without taking any vendor’s side.
About Bart
His consulting spans more than 25 delivery networks, among them Akamai, CDNetworks, Cloudflare, Fastly and IBM. In practice that means benchmarking providers on a client’s own traffic rather than a vendor’s demo, reading rate cards and contracts line by line, designing multi-CDN and DNS steering that fails over cleanly, and setting up edge security that holds when an attack arrives.
CDN World is run by Web and Cloud Innovation Ltd. from Ta’ Xbiex, Malta. The team has spent twenty years on both sides of the table, building, selling, pricing and supporting delivery services and then buying them on behalf of clients, and Bart’s writing draws on that: what a provider will concede, what a contract hides, and which numbers are worth measuring.
Areas of expertise
- CDN selection and fair benchmarking on real traffic
- Pricing, rate cards and contract negotiation
- Multi-CDN architecture and DNS-based steering
- Edge security: WAF, bot management and DDoS protection
- Delivery into licensed markets such as mainland China
How Bart writes
Every piece is researched against named sources (RFCs, vendor documentation, measurement reports), written from those facts in Bart’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 Bart has written
Articles (91)
- Compression dictionary transport on a CDN: what changes
- What happened to ChinaCache, and what it teaches
- CDN delivery into Russia and the CIS in 2026
- Cloudflare Alternatives: When Leaving Actually Pays
- Edge AI inference in 2026: what CDNs are actually selling
- Pay-per-crawl: the AI-crawler toll economy arrives
- Imperva CDN vs Reblaze (Link11): security-first delivery
- Running a fair CDN bake-off on your own traffic
- Preload, prefetch and 103 Early Hints: using idle time
- Implementing RUM properly: a field guide
- Deploying edge configuration like software
- Geo vs latency vs load: how CDN steering decisions get made
- Cache hit ratio: the metric that predicts your bill
- Azure CDN vs Azure Front Door: Microsoft’s two answers
- DNS TTL strategy: the timer that gates your failover
- QUIC.cloud vs NitroPack: the site-optimizer CDNs
- CDNetworks vs EdgeNext: the Asia specialists
- How to Read a CDN Invoice Like an Advisor
- NS1, Route 53 and Cloudflare DNS compared
- Multiplexing and prioritization: streams in the right order
- Google Cloud CDN vs Azure Front Door
- CDN77 vs Bunny.net: the value tier’s best argument
- Aryaka SmartCDN vs Section: edge delivery as managed service
- Azion vs Gcore: the emerging edge platforms
- CDN technical anatomy: how 37 networks actually differ
- Akamai vs CloudFront: negotiated scale or AWS gravity
- Akamai vs Azure Front Door: which edge for an Azure estate
- Cloudflare vs Akamai: enterprise security stacks
- Fastly vs Akamai for media delivery
- CloudFront vs Google Cloud CDN
- CloudFront vs Azure Front Door
- Google Cloud CDN vs Cloudflare
- Fastly Compute vs Cloudflare Workers
- Akamai EdgeWorkers vs Cloudflare Workers
- CloudFront Functions vs Lambda@Edge
- Bunny vs KeyCDN: pay-as-you-go CDN pricing compared
- Bunny vs BlazingCDN, the 2026 rematch
- The state of CDN pricing 2026
- Web fonts: delivering type without the flash
- Bot management across the big three
- Reading waterfalls: a TTFB debugging method
- Range requests: how video seeks and downloads resume
- Request coalescing and the thundering herd
- Fastly Next-Gen WAF vs Cloudflare WAF
- CDN trials: what to measure in 14 days
- Imperva vs Cloudflare: two ways to buy app security
- Radware vs Imperva: DDoS heritage or WAF specialist
- Myra vs Link11: the EU sovereignty duel
- Sucuri vs Cloudflare’s free tier
- A DDoS taxonomy: reading attacks by layer
- QUIC internals for delivery operators
- TTFB: what first byte time tells you
- DNS steering versus client-side switching
- Brotli and Zstandard support across CDNs
- HTTP/3 across the CDNs: who serves QUIC
- WebSockets across CDNs: who proxies the socket
- Image optimization add-ons compared
- Signed URLs and token auth across CDNs
- Delivering into China: the options, compared
- BBR and congestion control: why CDN throughput differs
- The true cost of free CDN tiers
- Testing your WAF like you mean it
- Egress fees: the cloud bill your CDN controls
- Committed-volume tiers, explained
- Fastly review 2026: where instant config earns its premium
- The security renewal trap: auto-renewals and overages
- Edge platforms for developers: the field
- Managed DNS for multi-CDN: the steering layer
- Delivering single-page apps: shells, chunks and caching
- Cloud CDNs vs independents: the structural bet
- CDNetworks review 2026: the Asia and China delivery network
- stale-while-revalidate, mechanically
- What CDNs can and cannot speed up
- Overage clauses, minimums and true-ups
- Crawl budget and delivery: SEO’s infrastructure layer
- The 25-provider landscape in 2026
- CORS at the edge: killing the preflight tax
- Signed URLs and token authentication at the edge
- HLS vs DASH: the format war that ended in CMAF
- Consistent hashing inside CDN clusters
- Capacity planning for your biggest night
- Low-latency HLS: partial segments and the delivery contract
- Cache fragmentation: multi-CDN’s quiet cost
- Multi-CDN as commercial leverage
- CDN list price versus street price
- Edge computing for buyers: what is real and what it costs
- What a millisecond is worth: the evidence, honestly read
- Vary, cache keys, and the art of not fragmenting
- Caching APIs, including the GraphQL problem
- Connection coalescing: fewer handshakes than you think
- Certificate chains, OCSP and the milliseconds they cost
Guides (53)
- How to warm a cache before a launch or sale day
- How to tag and allocate CDN spend to products
- How to shortlist CDNs: from thirty vendors to three
- How to set up a CDN pull zone: origin to edge in an hour
- How to set up SSAI-friendly caching for ad-supported video
- How to set security headers at the edge: copy-paste baseline
- How to run customer custom domains on a CDN
- How to reduce origin load: collapsing, keep-alive, shields
- How to prepare for DDoS: write the runbook before the attack
- How to plan a CDN proof-of-concept: criteria that bite
- How to keep configurations in sync across CDNs
- How to implement signed URLs and signed cookies
- How to do geo-blocking and access control at the edge
- How to design a multi-CDN architecture: patterns compared
- How to cache fonts and third-party assets: overlooked wins
- The CDN security baseline: what to switch on before launch
- Multi-CDN failover: a working setup, step by step
- How to work with a CDN advisor: what to expect and demand
- How to use zero-egress storage as a multi-CDN origin
- How to use Early Hints and preload headers for real gains
- How to tune origin keepalive and connection reuse
- How to tune WAF rules: killing false positives methodically
- How to switch on a WAF without breaking production
- How to speed up mobile delivery in emerging markets
- How to set up live streaming delivery: from encoder to edge
- How to set up DNS-based CDN steering, step by step
- How to serve software updates: ranges, resumes and mirrors
- How to serve a single-page app through a CDN correctly
- How to run your first CDN benchmark in one afternoon
- How to run a CDN vendor QBR: the agenda that gets results
- How to read a CDN contract: the eight clauses that matter
- How to read CDN coverage maps critically: POPs vs reality
- How to purge without pain: tags, wildcards and workflows
- How to protect video: tokens, DRM and watermarking, layered
- How to negotiate a CDN renewal: timeline, levers, numbers
- How to measure TTFB properly: edge vs origin attribution
- How to manage certificates and DNS across a multi-CDN estate
- How to keep security parity across multiple CDNs
- How to handle cookies and Vary without shredding your cache
- How to fail over between CDNs without dropping sessions
- How to enable HTTP/3 and verify it's actually serving
- How to deliver podcasts and audio at scale
- How to deliver game patches and big binaries on launch day
- How to debug a slow page behind a CDN: a triage flowchart
- How to cut video startup time: the first-frame checklist
- How to configure origin shield: when, where and how
- How to configure bot management: allow, block, challenge
- How to claim SLA credits: evidence, process, expectations
- How to audit your CDN security config: a quarterly checklist
- How to Manage AI Crawlers at the Edge
- How to Find Out Which CDN a Website Uses
- How to CDN an e-commerce store: carts and cache rules
- CDN logs: what to collect, where to keep it, what it costs
Comparisons (5)
- Cloudflare vs bunny.net: Bundled Platform or Metered Pipe?
- Fastly vs Cloudflare: Which CDN Fits Your Traffic?
- CDNetworks vs Akamai: Which CDN Fits Your Traffic?
- Akamai vs Gcore: Incumbent Grid or Challenger Edge?
- Akamai vs Cloudflare: Which CDN Fits Your Traffic?
Want Bart’s view on your own delivery estate? The free assessment puts it in writing.