How to Pick a Fast and Affordable CDN for Unity Games?

When it comes to providing better user experiences to engage your users in games, you might need a fast CDN to ensure quick content delivery and minimize waiting times

However, there are several CDNs available. Selecting a high-performance, reasonably priced CDN for your needs may be more challenging than you thought.

This article will explore various CDNs, compare their performance, and offer some advice on how to choose the best and most cost-effective CDN for your needs.

Table of contents

• A Comparative Analysis: Bunny CDN , Unity CCD , AWS CloudFront , and Google Cloud CDN
• Evaluating the Performance of Various CDNs
• Tips to Choose CDN

A Comparative Analysis: **Bunny CDN, Unity CCD, AWS CloudFront, and

Google Cloud CDN**

Bunny CDN

Bunny CDN, also known as bunny.net, is a reliable, powerful, and lightning-fast Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is designed to offer exceptional performance and is known for its cost-effective pricing.

Pros :

• Global Coverage: Bunny CDN offers excellent global coverage with points of presence in numerous locations worldwide.
• Affordable Pricing: Bunny CDN uses a pay-as-you-go model, making it affordable, especially for small to medium-sized businesses.
• Easy to Use: It offers a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate, even for those not well-versed in CDN services.

Cons :

• Limited Advanced Features: While Bunny CDN covers the basics well, it might lack some of the more advanced features offered by larger providers like AWS and Google.

Unity CCD

Unity CCD is a CDN solution specifically tailored for Unity game developers. It is a managed service and offers a dashboard to manage game resources, which allows you to reduce thousands of hours developing this system and administration work.

Pros :

• Unity Integration: Unity CCD is directly integrated with the Unity engine, making it easy for Unity developers to implement.
• Built for Games: It is designed with gaming in mind, focusing on the swift delivery of game assets.

Cons :

• Limited to Unity: Unity CCD is specifically designed for Unity, making it less useful for non-Unity projects.

AWS CloudFront

AWS CloudFront is a part of Amazon’s vast cloud services ecosystem, known for its scalability and reliability.

Pros :

• Integration with AWS Services: If you’re already using AWS services, CloudFront integrates seamlessly, offering a unified platform.
• Scalability: Like other AWS services, CloudFront is highly scalable, making it a good choice for large-scale applications.

Cons :

• Cost: While AWS CloudFront offers a robust set of features, it can be more expensive than other solutions, especially for high-volume data transfer.

Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud CDN leverages Google’s robust infrastructure for content delivery.

Pros:

• Global Network: Google’s vast global network ensures low latency and high-speed data transfer.
• Integration with Google Cloud: Like AWS, if you’re already using Google Cloud services, their CDN integrates seamlessly.

Cons:

• Pricing: While not as expensive as AWS, Google Cloud CDN can still be pricier than other options such as Bunny CDN.

Evaluating the Performance of Various CDNs

Next, let’s validate the performance of CDNs.

We will upload a video file with 68.4 MB to CDN beforehand and run wget command to test the downstream speed and latency.

1. Latency

We will run 8 times to download the file and calculate the average latency. The results are shown below.

• Horizontal axis : Cloud Vendor
• Vertical axis : Latency in second

Then we calculate the average time to download the video files for different CDN vendors.


• AWS S3 is the slowest CDN and its latency is around 17.75 sec while Unity CCD and Bunny CDN can achieve nearly the same speed. at around 7. xx sec and Google is a little bit slower at around 8 sec.

2. Speed

Let’s check the downloading speed in MB per second.

• Horizontal axis : Megabyte per second (MB/ sec)
• Vertical axis : Latency in second


• AWS S3 is still the slowest CDN and its speed is around 5.587 MB per second
• While Unity CCD and Bunny CDN can achieve nearly the same speed at around 9.1X MB per second.
• Google Storage can achieve decent speed at 8.4 MB per second.

Tips to Choose CDN

When considering CDNs, here’s what you need to keep in mind.

• Speed and throughput

This is how fast your CDN can deliver game content to the players.

Based on our test, we found Bunny CDN and Unity CCD are faster than others and can achieve the same speed and throughput.

• Development time and effort

Think about the amount of time and manpower you’ll need to put in to develop a resource management system.

Now, here’s a cool thing about Unity CCD — it comes with its own dashboard for managing resources.

So you can say goodbye to the headache of developing a resource management system, which you would have to do with other CDNs.

• Management and Cost

This means the management effort and costs for your CDN.

Unity CCD is a managed service that can reduce your administration work on CDNs.

In addition, Bunny CDN is the cheapest CDN and can provide the highest speed at low latency. But you need to implement a resource management system by yourself if you need it.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we explored the pros and cons of different CDNs, how they perform, and some tips to help you make the right choice.

If you’re watching your budget, Bunny CDN could be a great fit because it can provide affordable prices to achieve fast speed.

For those of you in small teams, [Unity CCD](https://unity.com/products/cloud- content-delivery) might be just what you need. You’ll save time on developing or managing a resource system for your game content. So you can focus on developing game features.

Of course, if you have enough manpower and budget, AWS CloudFront + S3 or Google Storage + CDN can be a superior option because you can implement any features you like.

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Thank you for reading!