StackPath

What StackPath actually is

StackPath is a defunct vendor. The company closed all of its products and began liquidating its assets in June 2024, so this review is deliberately different from our other entries: nobody can buy StackPath today, and we think it deserves a place in our database mainly as a case study in how quickly an edge platform can disappear. If you arrived here from an old comparison post still listing StackPath plans, stop and pick something else.

The company itself had real pedigree. It was founded on May 5, 2015 in Dallas, Texas by Lance Crosby, who had co-founded SoftLayer (acquired by IBM in 2013), along with a dozen co-founders. Rather than build one product, StackPath assembled itself from acquisitions: MaxCDN (2016), the DDoS mitigation vendor Staminus (2016), the WAF vendor Fireblade (2016), the VPN provider Cloak (2016), Highwinds Network Group (2017), and the monitoring company Server Density. The first shipped product was SecureCDN, a CDN with a built-in web application firewall and DDoS protection; after merging the MaxCDN and Highwinds codebases the company relaunched the whole thing as StackPath CDN in 2018. Around that it layered DNS, edge compute (virtual machines, containers, and serverless scripting), object storage, network transit, and colocation. The company raised just under $400 million across two rounds, with Juniper Networks, Cox Communications, and ABRY Partners on the cap table.

The unwind happened in stages. In 2019 StackPath sold its VPN businesses — IPVanish and Encrypt.me — to J2 Global. In May 2022 it retired the legacy MaxCDN and SecureCDN products to consolidate on StackPath CDN. In August 2023 it quit the CDN business entirely: Akamai bought roughly 100 enterprise customer contracts (about $20 million in expected revenue), but no staff and no technology. StackPath CDN and Highwinds CDN stopped serving at midnight Central on November 22, 2023. On June 12, 2024 the company told customers it had "decided to close all StackPath products and liquidate all assets for the benefit of our creditors" and would begin decommissioning immediately — edge compute, DNS, object storage, network transit, colocation, and monitoring all included. Technical support stopped at the same time. Customer invoicing had already halted on June 12; the company still asked for outstanding invoices to be paid. Wikipedia records the company as defunct on June 12, 2024, fate dissolved. Former employees confirmed the closure publicly.

Pricing: what you really pay

There is nothing to pay, because there is nothing to buy. New subscriptions stopped with the product retirements, invoicing stopped in June 2024, and the platform is decommissioned. We are deliberately not reproducing historical StackPath list prices here: archived price tables from 2021 and 2022 float around the web and quoting them would only help someone accidentally shop a dead catalog.

What we can say about the pricing model historically: it was tiered subscription pricing with a free trial rather than pure pay-as-you-go, and security features (WAF, DDoS mitigation) were sold as part of the platform or as add-ons depending on the era. That was actually one of StackPath's selling points against stitching together three vendors. It did not save them. For anyone reading this while mid-migration: Akamai handled the transition of the enterprise CDN contracts it bought, and Wasabi said it would take over or re-home accounts that held data in the Wasabi-backed object storage StackPath resold. Everyone else was on their own with a "copy all data off of our platform" email and no support.

Performance & infrastructure

StackPath's network was genuinely large by the end, which is part of what makes the story worth reading. The company's final claim was 73 edge locations across 43 metro markets, with a Paris location opening as late as April 2024 — a strange time to expand for a company weeks from closure. Earlier marketing claimed "50+ edge locations, 35 high population markets, 65+ Tbps total throughput" on its network page, while the homepage carried a "45 full-scale edge locations" count. These numbers drifted by page and by year, and the "50+ global PoPs" figure in our own database is one of those stale counts. We flagged that in the corrections.

Geographically the footprint covered North America densely (Toronto, New York, Ashburn, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and others), Europe, and Asia-Pacific — third-party network listings put PoPs in Brazil, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. Locations were connected by a private backbone, and the edge compute play was real: you could run VMs and containers in the same facilities that served cached content, with Anycast IPs in front. That combination — CDN, WAF, DDoS, DNS, and compute under one account — is what Cloudflare now sells almost alone at this scale, and it is why StackPath kept attracting customers even as the business shrank.

One more infrastructure note worth keeping: the object storage product was not home-grown. StackPath resold Wasabi-backed storage, which is why Wasabi was able to offer direct accounts or re-homing help when the shutdown hit. That pattern — a platform reselling another platform's capacity under its own brand — is more common than vendors admit, and it shapes who can actually rescue you when things go wrong. When a provider bundles "its own" storage or compute, we would always ask what happens to the data if the brand disappears; with StackPath the answer played out in public in mid-2024.

On measured performance we have nothing honest to say. We never ran our own sysbench, fio, or iperf3 suite against StackPath, and there is no way to do so now. If you want current numbers for edge platforms and CDNs that still exist, see our benchmarks.

Where it falls short

The platform no longer exists, and the manner of its ending is the biggest red flag of all. Customers got an email telling them to migrate immediately, with support already switched off and assets being liquidated for creditors. For infrastructure buyers that is the nightmare scenario, and it is worth extracting the lessons rather than shrugging at them.

First, venture scale does not equal safety. StackPath raised nearly $400 million and still could not find a durable niche between Cloudflare below and Akamai, Fastly, and the hyperscalers around it. Second, product churn was constant: MaxCDN and SecureCDN retired, VPN lines divested, CDN sold to a competitor, everything else killed. Customers who had standardized on one StackPath API went through at least three platform migrations in five years. Third, the marketing numbers were soft — three different edge-location counts coexisting on the live website is a transparency problem we would ding any vendor for, dead or alive. Our firewall and DDoS category has providers whose numbers we could actually verify.

There is also a practical, present-tense shortcoming: documentation and control plane are gone or rotting. Anything still pointing at StackPath nameservers, CNAMEs, or CDN hostnames is broken. DNS and certificate management tied to the platform had to be rebuilt elsewhere.

Who should pick this

Nobody. We cannot soften that. There is no SKU, no free tier, no enterprise contract to sign.

What we would actually do depends on the workload you were running on StackPath. For CDN plus WAF plus DDoS plus edge compute in one platform at predictable pricing — the exact pitch StackPath made — Cloudflare is the obvious successor and we would start there. For raw delivery performance with a developer-grade API, Fastly or Akamai (which literally took on StackPath's CDN customers) are the natural landing spots; see our CDN category. For edge compute specifically, Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, and Deno Deploy cover the serverless-at-the-edge use case, and our edge computing category lists the current field. If you had data in StackPath object storage, check whether it was Wasabi-backed and claim the account directly with Wasabi.

More broadly: if you run anything on a single venture-funded platform, keep an exit path. Exportable data, portable configs, and DNS you control at a registrar outside the vendor are unglamorous insurance that StackPath's customers needed all at once in June 2024.

Key takeaways

• StackPath is finished: all products closed and assets liquidated from June 12, 2024; the CDN line had already stopped on November 22, 2023.
• The company was well funded (just under $400 million) and well built (MaxCDN, Highwinds, Staminus, Fireblade acquisitions) yet never found a defensible niche against Cloudflare and Akamai.
• The final footprint — 73 edge locations across 43 metro markets, per the company's own last count — was substantial; the platform's problem was the business, not the network.
• Exit terms were harsh: support cut off immediately, customers told to copy all data off, liquidation for creditors. Plan for this with every infrastructure vendor.
• If you want the StackPath combination of CDN, WAF, DDoS, and edge compute today, Cloudflare is our pick, with Fastly and Akamai as performance-first alternatives.
• Treat any pricing table or feature matrix for StackPath found elsewhere on the web as historical documentation, not shopping advice.

Sources

• https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/stackpath-to-close-down-liquidate-assets/
• https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/stackpath-quits-cdn-business-akamai-buys-enterprise-customer-contracts/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackPath
• https://stackpath.com/why-stackpath/network
• https://stackpath.com
• https://cdnplanet.com/cdns/stackpath