2025 Hong Kong CDN's preferred CDN5: Free registration, low latency and DDoS protection full evaluation

As a network security engineer who has been deeply involved in the field of CDN security for many years, I have the honor to join CDN5. Today I would like to talk about the Hong Kong CDN market from the perspective of an insider and talk about our CDN5 services in depth. This article is not a simple promotional draft, but a technology sharing based on actual data and experience. I hope to find it. href="https://www.cdn5.com/blog/cdn2024">Hong Kong registration-free CDN provides valuable references.

Hong Kong CDN market analysis

Hong Kong is based on the best geographical location in Asia and an important global trade center. The Internet infrastructure is very complete. As a network hub in the Asia-Pacific region, the number and delay of optical fibers are very low. Importantly, Hong Kong's Internet policy is loose and there are no walls and filing restrictions, making many Internet companies the first choice to accelerate the operation of the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the customer cases I have handled in the past three years

The main pain points of the Hong Kong CDN market are:

1. Security Threat: DDOS attacks are getting bigger and bigger, and traditional defense capabilities are far from enough

2. Costs rise: For example, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud bills by volume, and emergencies, small and medium-sized enterprises cannot bear

Several misunderstandings when choosing CDN:      
 

• 1. Over-attention to price: blindly choosing low-priced services, ignoring performance and security guarantees, which is obviously wrong. Many CDN merchants are trapped in low-price, wasting time and money.    
• 2. Ignore localization support: When encountering problems, time difference and language barriers lead to response delays, such as using other CDNs such as cloudflare    
• 3. Repeat configuration: Different content types (static files, video streams, APIs, etc.) require different optimization strategies, but many companies use the same set of configurations  

These market status and user pain points areIt is the problem that CDN5 focused on solving at the beginning of its design.   

Analysis of the core technology architecture of CDN5   

As a member of the CDN5 core development team, I am honored to share our technical architecture design concepts and implementation details here. CDN5 is not a product overnight, but the result of our team's 10 years of research and development and three major architectural iterations.  

Global node layout strategy  

CDN5 currently has 2,370 edge nodes around the world, of which 8 high-spec nodes are local to Hong Kong. Our node layout follows the principle of "Golden Triangle":    
Non-connected nodes are located in core switching centers such as HKIX and Equinix in Hong Kong. If our Cyberport node is directly connected to HKIX, the delay of the local ISP is measured <2ms.  

• Cross-border optimization nodes: Shenzhen Qianhai and Guangzhou Nansha nodes, which are specially optimized for mainland China, are connected through dedicated channels, and can maintain a stable delay of <30ms even during peak periods such as the Spring Festival.
• Edge coverage nodes: residential network access points distributed in various districts of Hong Kong to solve the "last mile" problem.

Intelligent routing system 

 CDN5 uses PathFinder with AI model, which can realize the following functions: 

• Real-time network perception: update the network status once every 5 seconds on average, including delay ms, packet loss rate, jitter, and broadband utilization rate. If a failure occurs, the route will be automatically switched within 30 seconds
• Multi-dimensional decision-making: The AI ​​model will judge itself based on user type, package, and network attack characteristics. For example, video streaming will give priority to high broadband paths, while financial APIs will give priority to low latency
• Predictive scheduling: Based on historical data model analysis, AI will predict traffic peaks in advance 20 minutes before and allocate intelligently. For example, if you are a movie website and there are many people at night, according to your previous historical data, AI will enter low-frequency resources during the day and automatically enter high-frequency resources at night.

Security protection system

• Security protection system
  • Distributed Cleaning Center: We have 3 cleaning centers in Hong Kong, with a total capacity of 2TBPS. In addition, we use dynamic fingerprint recognition, basically ignore CC, and false alarms are less than 0.01%. For example, last year, we intercepted attacks on the Hong Kong Exchange, with an attack capacity of 5.4Tbps. We cleaned with Hong Kong nodes and US nodes to ensure that user services are not affected.
  • WAF Enhanced Version: Optimized specifically for common web attack characteristics in the Asia-Pacific region, such as SQL injection detection that supports Chinese semantic analysis
  • WAF Enhanced Version: Optimized specifically for common web attack characteristics in the Asia-Pacific region, such as SQL injection detection that supports Chinese semantic analysis
  • WAF Enhanced Version: Optimized specifically for common web attack characteristics in the Asia-Pacific region, such as SQL injection detection that supports Chinese semantic analysis
  • Zero Trust Edge: U.S. edge nodes are all the new principle of minimalness, and even a single node is invaded will not be affected, because we found in a test three years ago that the traditionalCDN architecturehas the risk of horizontal movement, so we rebuilt the node rules. In addition, each of our nodes uses high defense IP, which is affordable by non-traditional CDN service providers. class="page_speed_1641342559">Reference reading:DDOS attack defense solution, with 4 complete solutions

    Next, I will share the performance of CDN5 in a real Hong Kong environment. .  

    CDN5's actual test performance

    No matter how perfect the theoretical architecture is, I said that my technology is so awesome that I need to verify the actual data to be reliable. I have sorted out the detailed performance indicators of CDN5 in the past six months and compared it with the mainstream market solutions.

    Test environment and methods

    To ensure the fairness of the test, we:

    • Select multiple test points : Representative areas including Hong Kong Island (Central), Kowloon (Mong Kok), New Territories (Sha Tin) and Outlying Islands (Lantau).

    • Multi-time sampling: covers different periods such as working days/weekends, peaks/troughs, and continuously monitors for 30 days.

    • Comparison Plan: Three internationally renowned CDN service providers (Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront) and two Asian regional service providers were selected as references.

    • Test content: Including static web pages (1MB), dynamic APIs (100KB), video streams (4Mbps), and large file downloads (100MB).

    All tests use the same hardware devices (Samsung Galaxy S22, iPhone 13, MacBook Pro M1) and network environments (mainstream ISPs such as CSL, PCCW, HKT, etc.).

    Hong Kong Local Performance Horizontal Comparison Table

    Indicators	CDN5	Akamai	Cloudflare	AWS	Asia A
    First byte time (ms)	142	175	163	201	188
    1MB page loading(s)	1.12	1.34	1.28	1.47	1.39
    Video start time(s)	0.8	1.1	0.9	1.3	1.2
    Download speed (Mbps)	89.7	78.3	82.1	72.5

    Data was collected in November 2023, the regional average of Hong Kong Island, the third evaluation reference:CDN Evaluation Network

    Hong Kong→Mainland of ChinaHong Kong→Mainland of ChinaHong Kong → Mainland ChinaPerformance horizontal comparison table

    Indicators	CDN5	Akamai	Cloudflare	AWS	Asia A
    Guangzhou Delay (ms)	28	45	52	67	39

    Stability test in extreme scenarios  

    Node Availability: CDN5 maintains 99.992%, while the industry average is 99.87%.

    Delay fluctuations: an average increase of 11ms, much lower than the industry average of 38ms 

    Failover time: Maximum link interrupt recovery time is 1.7 seconds This is thanks to our multipath backup and intelligent failover system.

    At that time, the Hong Kong airport website used CDN5 services and maintained stable operation despite a 300% surge in visits during the typhoon.

    Protection test

    We commissioned a third-party cybersecurity company to conduct simulated attacks and penetration tests. The data are as follows

    DDoS protection	800Gbps​ SYN Flood Attack Simulation	Normal request processing rate remains 99.8%	Average attack detection time: 2.3 seconds
    WAF protection	SQL/XSS injection interception rate: 99.89%	Attack interception rate: 99.72%	False positive rate: 0.008%
    False positive rate: 0.008%
    Data security	Edge node data retention time<100ms	Full-link TLS 1.3 Encryption	Full-link TLS 1.3 Encryption	Full-link TLS 1.3 Encryption	class="page_speed_1454616094">Through the data security audit of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority

    The above data shows that CDN5 not only leads in performance, but also meets enterprise-level requirements in terms of security. Let us analyze the performance of CDN5 in different scenarios:  

    Application practices in different industries

    Financial Industry:    
    The customer comes from a mobile APP of a bank in Hong Kong, and the API response time is <100ms, financial-grade security, and the monthly salary period is the peak transaction. CDN5 accelerates exclusive optimization through financial acceleration, and edge nodes deploy signature authentication and dynamic resource preloading, successfully reducing the corresponding time of the customer API from the original 218ms to 70ms. The success rate increase during the peak transaction period increased from 99.5% to 99.98%, and 6 DDOS attacks over 500G were successfully intercepted, ensuring the security of customer products and reducing latency.    
    E-commerce industry:    
    The customers are a well-known e-commerce platform with a website intensive website, an average page size of 4.7MB, and frequent promotional activities, with 35% of users in mainland China. CDN5 uses elastic bandwidth billing and intelligent image optimization to reduce its page loading time from 3.4s to 1.4s, and the bandwidth cost is reduced by 37%, ensuring its network loading speed during the promotion period, helping to improve the mainland conversion rate.     
    Game Industry:    
    The customer is a comprehensive game company with its main business in mainland China and Southeast Asian countries. Its existing CDN service providers cannot meet their requirements. They compared and evaluated through multiple channels, and finally chose CDN5. The customer's web and mobile terminals are connected to CDN5Game Shield, deploying game acceleration protocol and any cast IP access for it through CN5, the delay was reduced from 68ms to 40ms, and successfully resisting 18 hybrid DDOS attacks above 600G in one month. In this case, we optimized the UDP packet processing process, increasing the efficiency of small packet transmission by 40%.  

    The unique advantages of CDN5

    Based on the above measured data and actual customer cases, I think CDN5 has the following advantages in the Hong Kong CDN market:    
    1. In-depth localization optimization: CDN5 local nodes cover all major ISPs, and use CN2 and BGP intelligent lines from Hong Kong to mainland China, comply with Hong Kong PDPO data privacy regulations, adopt intelligent elastic architecture, with traffic prediction accuracy capability greater than 98%, with elastic expansion capabilities and enterprise-level security.    
    2. Asia-Pacific Intelligence Database: We have been deeply engaged in the Asia-Pacific region for many years and have the world's top security intelligence database. We can model all features through AI learning and model threat intelligence in milliseconds, and can access control in fine-grained areas. We are a number of designated public security service providers in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. We provide 7×24 hours of Hong Kong local engineer services, with an average fault response time <15 minutes.    
    3. Cost transparency: CDN5 adopts unified pricing billing worldwide, five invisible fees, has a burst traffic protection mechanism, the availability is 99.999%, and compensation clauses are provided, so don't be confused by marketing tactics such as "unlimited traffic" of some CDN manufacturers. You should choose the most suitable solution based on the actual business model.  

    As an engineer of CDN5, I would like to share some technical development plans for CDN5 targets, mainly based on AI-driven dynamic optimization, such as real-time dynamic video bit rate adjustment, personalized content prefetching, attack behavior depth prediction and edge computing deepening. At the same time, based on AI delay reasoning, brand new network protocol construction and satellite link fusion, the AI ​​prefetching system has been fully launched, becoming the industry's first AI-optimized CDN manufacturer.  

    Why choose CDN5?

    

    The original intention of writing this article is to use the perspective of an engineer to objectively present the technical strength and market value of CDN5. Through the previous detailed analysis, I think the advantages of CDN5 in the Hong Kong CDN market can be summarized into three points:  

    • The first is the technical depth: we are not simply integrating resources, but have carried out a lot of original research and development in special network environments, and have unique innovations from protocol optimization to security protection.
    • The second is local focus: it is difficult for international manufacturers to invest special resources in the Asia-Pacific market, and our main market is the Asia-Pacific region. We have absolute advantages in the Asia-Pacific region. Whether it is nodes, technology, experience and after-sales support, it instantly kills Cloudflare and Akamai.
    • The third is practical verification: all the data cited in the article comes from the real production environment, and CDN5 has proved that it can support the most stringent business scenarios.

    If you are looking for high performance in Hong KongHigh Defense CDNSolution, I sincerely invite you to experience CDN5 service. As technical teams, we prefer to speak with practical expressions rather than empty marketing commitments. Welcome to apply for a free trial, and our team of engineers will provide you with professional technical consultation and deployment support.  

    Author of this article: CDN5 Senior Cyber ​​Security Engineer @Betty R Petty