Buying Guide: Choosing a CDN After Recent Outages — Questions to Ask and Metrics to Demand

Hook: Procurement urgency after the January 2026 outage wave

If your procurement team still treats CDNs as a commodity, the Jan 2026 outage wave should change that. High-profile disruptions that traced back to major edge providers and their dependencies exposed brittle SLAs, opaque metrics, and slow remediation playbooks. For operations teams and small business owners buying or renewing CDN services, the question is no longer just "Which provider performs best?" — it is "Which vendor will keep my business reachable, accountable, and contractually bound when the next outage hits?"

Executive summary — what to demand today

• Per-region uptime SLAs (not just global): require per-continent and per-country uptime numbers and credits.
• MTTR and error-budget definitions: set maximum Mean Time to Repair (e.g., MTTR < 30 minutes for network failures) and explicit error budget calculations.
• Performance percentiles: demand p50/p90/p99 latency and TTFB for edge responses and origin failover times.
• Observability and logs: near-real-time structured logs (Kafka/S3), 90–365 day retention, OpenTelemetry/Prometheus-compatible metrics.
• Contract language: enforceable credits, RCAs within 72 hours, termination for repeated SLA misses, and migration assistance clauses.

Why this matters in 2026: trends that change the procurement calculus

Recent outages (notably the January 2026 incidents that impacted multiple high-traffic platforms) have accelerated three procurement trends that matter now:

• Edge complexity and vendor lock-in. CDNs have evolved into global platforms offering WAF, DDoS mitigation, edge compute (Cloud Functions/Workers), and load balancing. That breadth increases risk if a single vendor fails during a surge.
• Multi‑CDN and active‑active routing. More enterprises are implementing multi-CDN architectures and smart traffic steering to reduce single‑vendor risk. Procurement must evaluate a vendor's interoperability (APIs, logs, traffic-splitting) with other CDNs.
• Security & compliance expectations. With SASE adoption and stronger regulation in 2025–26 (data residency and cross-border rules), procurement now must verify SOC2/ISO/PCI attestations and software supply chain hygiene within CDN vendor ecosystems.

Concrete questions to ask every CDN vendor (procurement checklist)

Use this list during RFPs, PoCs, and vendor demos. These are oriented to operations, security, and legal stakeholders.

Operational resilience and architecture

• Can you provide per‑PoP and per-region availability statistics for the past 12 months?
• What is your average and peak capacity per PoP and how do you handle saturated links or flash crowds?
• Describe your peering, transit, and interconnect strategy (IXP presence, direct peerings, cloud on-ramps).
• Do you support active-active multi-CDN integration (traffic split, originless fallback, consistent cache keys)? Provide case studies.

Performance and observability

• Provide p50/p90/p95/p99 latency and TTFB numbers for edge responses by region and content type (HTML, JS, images, video).
• What is your cache hit ratio at the edge (global and regionally) and how is it measured?
• What real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic testing options do you expose? Are APIs and raw logs available in near-real-time?
• How fast are purge and invalidation commands globally (average and worst-case)?

Security and compliance

• What DDoS mitigation capacity do you maintain (Gbps/Tbps) and what is your mitigation SLA?
• Do you have documented incident response processes and a published security playbook we can review?
• Which certifications do you maintain (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR/DPF equivalences) and can you provide recent reports under NDA?
• How do you handle TLS key management, HSM support, and certificate lifecycle? Can keys remain under customer control?

APIs, integration, and vendor lock-in

• Provide API docs: rate limits, idempotency, error responses. Is the API stable with semantic versioning?
• How do you export configuration and cache rules for portability? Offer config-as-code or Terraform providers?
• What is your data export process on contract termination (logs, configs, analytics)?

Support, escalation, and transparency

• Provide the escalation matrix, contact SLAs for P1/P2 incidents, and whether a dedicated TAM is included.
• Do you provide post-incident RCAs with timeline and remediation items? What is your SLA for RCA delivery?

Uptime metrics and performance KPIs to demand

Vendors often advertise a single global uptime number; that is insufficient. Here are the operational metrics you should contractually require and measure as part of acceptance tests and ongoing review.

Availability and reachability

• Per-region uptime: require availability per continent and per critical country for the preceding 12 months (e.g., Europe 99.995%, APAC 99.99%).
• PoP-level reachability: percentage of PoPs reachable from major cloud providers and ISPs every 5 minutes.
• Anycast health: metrics on route convergence time and BGP flap counts per PoP.

Performance

• Latency percentiles: p50/p90/p95/p99 for Time to First Byte (TTFB) and full page load for representative endpoints.
• Cache hit ratio: global and origin-shielded hit ratios for static and dynamic caching.
• Origin offload: percentage of requests served from edge vs origin under normal and peak loads.
• TLS handshake success & latency: percent of TLS handshakes that complete within thresholds and percent that fall back to older TLS.

Reliability and remediation

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for network and edge software incidents (e.g., MTTD < 2 minutes, MTTR < 30 minutes for network failures).
• Failover time: time to route traffic to secondary origin or alternate PoP.
• Error rate: 5xx rates per 1M requests and per-region thresholds.

Sample SLA and contract language (copy/paste to RFPs and SOWs)

Below are vendor-agnostic clause templates procurement teams can adapt. Have legal review tailored versions.

Service Availability SLA
Provider guarantees Service Availability of at least 99.99% per Region per Calendar Month. 'Service Availability' = (Total Time - Downtime) / Total Time. Downtime excludes scheduled maintenance notified at least 72 hours in advance.

Service Credits
If monthly Regional Availability falls below 99.99%, Customer will receive Service Credits as follows:
- 99.99% to 99.50%: 10% credit
- 99.49% to 99.00%: 25% credit
- < 99.00%: 50% credit and Customer may terminate for convenience with 30 days' notice and receive pro-rata refunds.

MTTR & RCA
Provider shall maintain MTTR < 30 minutes for Network layer incidents and < 60 minutes for Edge cache/control plane incidents. Provider shall deliver a Root Cause Analysis within 72 hours of incident closure including timeline, impact, and remediation plan.

Termination & Migration Assistance
If Provider breaches SLA three or more times within any rolling 12-month period, Customer may terminate for convenience with 30 days' notice and Provider will provide migration assistance for 90 days, including export of configuration, logs, and staged DNS cutover support.

Log & Data Access
Provider will stream structured logs to Customer's chosen endpoint (Kafka/S3) with < 5 minutes latency and retain logs for at least 90 days. On termination, Provider will export all Customer data and configurations in machine-readable formats within 7 business days.
  

What to include in SLA calculations and credits (be specific)

Vendors try to limit credits with narrow definitions. Push back and specify:

• Downtime measurement windows (UTC monthly) and aligned clocks (NTP) for dispute resolution.
• Credits calculated as a percentage of monthly fees attributable to the affected service segment (edge, WAF, DDoS mitigation) rather than total invoice.
• Exclusions only for documented force majeure; scheduled maintenance limited to a maximum of 2 windows/month and not during peak business hours without explicit consent.

Acceptance tests and onboarding milestones procurement should require

Define a clear proof-of-concept (PoC) with success metrics before full rollout.

1. Traffic split pilot (2–4 weeks): run as active-active with 10–25% traffic to new CDN to validate real-user metrics against baseline.
2. Failover test: scheduled origin failover to confirm failover time < agreed SLA (e.g., 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on architecture).
3. Peak load simulation: vendor must demonstrate handling 1.5x expected peak traffic in controlled test and provide after-action report.
4. Security drill: tabletop DDoS/WAF scenario and proof of mitigation within MTTR bounds.
5. Data export test: request a full configuration export and log retrieval to validate portability procedures.

Scoring model for procurement: how to compare providers objectively

Use a weighted scoring model. Example weights (customize for your priorities):

• Availability & SLAs — 25%
• Performance (latency & cache hit) — 20%
• Observability & Logs — 15%
• Security & Compliance — 15%
• Integration & Portability — 10%
• Cost & TCO transparency — 10%
• Support & Onboarding — 5%

Score each vendor on 0–5 for each criterion, multiply by weight, and rank. This forces trade-offs into numbers rather than sales promises.

Advanced strategies for 2026: reduce single-vendor risk

Beyond contract language, practical architecture and process changes reduce outage exposure.

Multi‑CDN with smart traffic steering

Implement active‑active traffic routing across two or more CDNs. Use a global traffic manager (DNS or BGP-aware traffic controller) that can make routing decisions based on real-user metrics and health checks. Contractually require vendors to support consistent cache keying and header normalization to limit cache misses during failover.

Standardized observability

Insist on OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics and logs. Aggregate CDN telemetry in your APM/SIEM and set automated alerting for per-region anomalies. Validate that the CDN exposes the raw request IDs you need to trace user sessions across edge and origin.

Runbooks, drills, and joint post-mortems

Include contractual requirements for quarterly joint incident drills, access to vendor runbooks during incidents, and participation in post-incident retrospectives. These operational exercises shorten real MTTR when incidents occur.

Real-world checklist: procurement playbook (printable)

• Include per-region uptime and MTTR metrics in RFP.
• Require structured logs streaming w/ retention >= 90 days.
• Demand RCAs within 72 hours and specific remediation timelines.
• Insist on migration assistance and config/data export on termination.
• Test failover and load handling during PoC with real traffic or replay.
• Benchmark p50/p90/p99 latencies and cache hit ratios in key geographies.
• Verify DDoS capacity, WAF rule tuning, and patch cadence for edge software.

Procurement imperative: Don’t sign a perpetual‑credit SLA. Define clear credits, termination rights, and migration assistance tied to repeated failures.

Cloudflare alternatives and vendor selection in 2026

Many enterprises are evaluating alternatives and complements to the largest providers to diversify risk. In 2026 consider vendors that excel in one or more of these dimensions:

• Regional strength in APAC/Latin America with deep ISP peering.
• Strong edge compute and developer experience for application migration.
• Best-in-class observability and log export for SRE workflows.
• Transparent pricing and COGS-based TCO models for high-bandwidth workloads.

When comparing Cloudflare alternatives, use the checklist above and insist on vendor-provided historical outage timelines and RCA archives under NDA.

Common procurement pitfalls to avoid

• Accepting a single global uptime number without per-region detail.
• Relying solely on vendor dashboards without ingesting raw logs into your monitoring stack.
• Skipping failover testing because it’s “too disruptive” — that is exactly the failure mode you must validate.
• Allowing vague RCA commitments — require timelines and specific remedial actions.

Actionable next steps for procurement and ops teams

1. Update your RFP template with the questions and SLA language above; run it by legal and SRE.
2. Schedule PoC traffic split tests and failover drills with shortlisted vendors.
3. Integrate CDN logs into your central observability stack and set regional SLOs and alerting.
4. Negotiate enforceable credits, MTTR, and migration assistance before signing extension renewals.

Closing: why procurement matters more than ever

The January 2026 outage wave was a reminder that CDN outages are not just a technical problem — they're a business risk. Procurement teams now have leverage: demand granularity, require demonstrable resilience, and insist on contract terms that make reliability measurable and enforceable. The right mix of technical testing, observability, and contract language will reduce vendor risk and speed recovery when incidents occur.

Call to action

Need a ready-to-use RFP & SLA template or a vendor comparison workbook tailored to your traffic profile? Download our CDN procurement kit and get a 15-minute consult with an enterprise hosting specialist to scope a PoC that matches your compliance and performance goals.

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