# Akamai CDN 9 Hacker News commenters recommended Akamai CDN and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months. **Verdict:** People recommend Akamai for handling large enterprise sites at scale and for being a solid CDN choice. The most common caveat is that you must sign a sales agreement before use, with no public pricing. ## Why people recommend it - Handles large enterprise sites at scale (2 comments): "Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46559731)) "How often do you hear of Akamai going down and they host a LOT more enterprise/high value sites than Cloudflare." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46159209)) - Praised as good among major CDNs (2 comments): "Much better from akamai, tornado, kamatera, others." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799237)) "Akamai, Google, AWS, etc all have good solutions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169662)) ## What people warn about - Opaque or overpriced pricing, sales agreement required (3 comments): "you can't even use Akamai without signing a sales agreement ahead of using them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612913)) "Going to Akamai's site I don't see a single mention of pricing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967018)) "overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625343)) - Hostile to users, fingerprinting and blocking (3 comments): "Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48232171)) "both companies were on a user hostile (per usual) campaign to hide query parameters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586382)) "they block many user mercilessly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908040)) - Outages blamed on configuration problems (2 comments): "configuration problem in Akamai’s infrastructure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187700)) "Akamai is who dropped the ball here" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650233)) - Caching and filtering quirks (3 comments): "Akamai edge servers don't cache responses that include the Vary header" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459899)) "Akamai was just giving a blank 403 because it looked to much like SQL." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49620720)) "Which, on Akamai, are by default ignored!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47331383)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Cloudflare](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare.md): 744 recommend - [Bunny.net](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bunny-net.md): 121 recommend - [Amazon CloudFront](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-cloudfront.md): 24 recommend - [Cloudflare CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-cdn.md): 12 recommend - [Fastly CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fastly.md): 10 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.akamai.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Akamai CDN", https://hackerapproved.com/p/akamai/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).