KeyCDN

What KeyCDN actually is

KeyCDN is a Swiss content delivery network run by proinity LLC, a privately funded company headquartered in Switzerland and founded in 2012 by Jonas Krummenacher and Sven Baumgartner. The important structural claim it makes is on the about page: this is not a federated CDN and not reselling someone else's network. KeyCDN built its own delivery architecture and contracts its own capacity in third-party datacenters, and it says so explicitly. In a market where plenty of "CDNs" are thin wrappers over larger platforms, we think that distinction is worth stating up front, because it explains both the strengths and the limits of the service.

The product is a classic pull-zone and push-zone CDN with a web dashboard, a REST API, and a genuinely flat feature set: every account gets every feature regardless of size. Instant purge, TLS certificates at no cost, Origin Shield, secure tokens, image processing, real-time reporting, edge rules, DDoS protection, HTTP/2 — no enterprise tier gatekeeping. That "all features for all customers" policy is the single most likeable thing about KeyCDN and the reason it stays on our shortlist in /category/cdn-providers even though it is far smaller than the hyperscale options.

There is one correction to make against older profiles of the company, including our own database row: the network is no longer "34 PoPs". KeyCDN's network page currently advertises 60+ data centers in 40+ countries across six continents, and the location list runs from Atlanta and Chicago through Zurich and Warsaw to Johannesburg, Lagos, Almaty and Sydney. The company has kept expanding selectively — it says it only adds locations where real value can be added — but the footprint in 2026 is materially larger than the number still quoted in most reviews.

Pricing: what you really pay

KeyCDN prices purely on usage, and the published table is exactly the kind of transparency we ask for. North America and Europe cost $0.04/GB for the first 10 TB per month, then $0.03/GB for the next 40 TB, $0.02/GB for the next 50 TB, and $0.01/GB above 100 TB. Asia and Oceania run $0.08/GB to start; Africa and Latin America $0.10/GB, stepping down with volume. There is no commitment — you pay for what you transfer.

The fine print matters here. There is a minimum usage charge of $4 per month and a minimum payment of $49 when you top up, so a hobby site that transfers almost nothing still pays a few dollars monthly and carries a balance. The first three zones are free and each additional zone is $1 per month. Push Zone storage starts at $0.12/GB per month billed daily (Pull Zone storage has no additional cost), log forwarding via syslog costs $1 per day, and image processing is $0.40 per 1,000 operations. TLS certificates are free across supported types. Support is 24/7 for all customers at no extra cost — no paid support tier.

Run the arithmetic before you sign up: for a European blog doing 50 GB of traffic a month, raw delivery is $2, but the $4 monthly minimum is what you actually pay. For an EU software distributor pushing terabytes, the tiered rates down to $0.01/GB are among the better numbers in the industry. The 14-day trial requires no credit card, which we take as a good-faith signal — no auto-conversion trap. Note that there is no ongoing free tier; the trial is the only zero-cost entry, and our database tag claiming a free tier is wrong on that point.

Performance & infrastructure

The network page is specific enough to assess: 60+ points of presence in 40+ countries, each in "premium data centers" with direct access to multiple Tier 1 network providers, at least 40 Gbps uplinks per edge server, 100% SSD coverage, ISO 27001 certification claimed for the security posture, and an anycast plus latency-based routing design. That is a serious mid-size CDN architecture. It is not CloudFront or Cloudflare scale, but the per-PoS hardware claims are stronger than most budget CDNs publish.

Coverage weighting is European, as you would expect from a Swiss vendor: dense in Europe (18+ listed cities including Zurich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Warsaw, Kyiv and Athens), solid in North America, thin but present in Africa (Johannesburg, Lagos), Latin America (Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, São Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City) and the Middle East (Dubai, Tel Aviv, Istanbul). If your audience is heavily African or South Asian, the PoP density argument shifts against KeyCDN; if it is European, the latency story is competitive with anyone.

On protocols, HTTP/2 is listed among included features and TLS is handled at the edge for free. KeyCDN's engineering blog covers QUIC and HTTP/3 in depth, but we could not confirm from the current feature pages whether HTTP/3 is enabled for all zones by default — we flag it as unresolved rather than repeat the claim. IPv6 support is likewise something we could not verify on current pages and leave unset in our specs rather than assert one way or the other. What we can say from the docs: instant purge, origin shielding, secure token auth, and edge rules are all there, which covers the configuration surface most teams actually need.

We have not benchmarked KeyCDN ourselves — our dated sysbench, fio and iperf3 runs at /benchmarks measure cloud instances, not CDN delivery — so we make no hands-on speed claims here. The vendor's reliability story rests on eliminating single points of failure through distributed power, cooling and multi-Tier-1 connectivity.

Where it falls short

The most concrete gap is contractual: KeyCDN publishes no SLA page. There is no uptime percentage with service credits attached that we could find on the site, which means that when delivery breaks, your remedy is goodwill, not a contract. For a CDN sitting in front of a revenue-generating site, that is a real procurement problem, and it is the main reason we score reliability below the top of our scale despite decent infrastructure.

Second, scale ceilings. If you need WAF-grade security, bot management, edge compute with thousands of workers, image formats beyond what KeyCDN's processing covers, or a hundred PoPs for global audiences, you are outside what this network sells. There is no edge compute platform here in the modern sense, and the ecosystem of integrations, Terraform providers and community tooling is smaller than the hyperscalers'.

Third, the billing micro-fees add up in ways the headline rate does not suggest. Zones beyond the third, syslog log forwarding at $1 per day, image processing per thousand operations, Push Zone storage billed daily — a configuration-heavy account can spend more on the add-ons than on delivery. None of it is hidden; it is all on the pricing page. But it rewards reading carefully.

Fourth, the company is small and privately held. That is part of its appeal — no venture pressure to upsell — but it also means a support team that is 24/7 without being enormous, a roadmap driven by one engineering organisation, and concentration risk if the business changes hands. The same is true of any independent provider; we just prefer it stated.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European businesses, privacy-conscious teams, and developers who want CDN pricing they can model on a spreadsheet. The Swiss corporate home and GDPR positioning are genuinely relevant if your compliance story requires EU/Swiss data handling rather than a US-headquartered provider, and the pay-as-you-go structure suits variable traffic far better than commit contracts. Software distribution, WordPress and CMS acceleration, ad and media delivery, game and download hosting — the classic CDN workloads — all fit.

We would not pick it for a globally distributed consumer product where African or South Asian latency is a KPI, or for any workload where procurement demands a signed uptime SLA with credits. In those cases the hyperscale CDNs or Cloudflare's free-and-paid tiers win on coverage and contract terms, even at higher unit cost for heavy traffic. As always, measure before you migrate — our instance-level data at /benchmarks is a starting point for the origin side.

Key takeaways

• Swiss, independent, non-federated CDN from proinity LLC (founded 2012) — its own architecture, not a reseller wrapper.
• Network is 60+ data centers in 40+ countries across six continents; older 34-PoP descriptions are out of date.
• Transparent usage pricing: $0.04/GB in North America and Europe down to $0.01/GB over 100 TB, with a $4/month minimum charge and $49 minimum payment.
• Every account gets every feature — instant purge, free TLS, Origin Shield, secure tokens, image processing, DDoS protection — with no enterprise gating.
• No published uptime SLA and no ongoing free tier (14-day trial only); the $4 minimum makes it poor value for near-zero traffic.
• Strong fit for EU/privacy-sensitive workloads and variable traffic; less convincing for global consumer scale or SLA-driven procurement.

Sources

• https://www.keycdn.com/about
• https://www.keycdn.com/pricing
• https://www.keycdn.com/network
• https://www.keycdn.com/cdn-services
• https://www.keycdn.com/features
• https://en.everybodywiki.com/KeyCDN
• https://thecompanycheck.com/company/b/keycdn/2d4b57e9fb634d9aa