Latency is mostly
just distance.
So we shortened it. 20 edge locations on our own network, serving cached copies of your site from the city nearest your visitor. Unlimited traffic, no throttling, no separate bill from anybody else.
Without a CDN
~280 ms
Sydney → London → Sydney
- Visitor in Sydney
- ~17,000 km, each way
- Origin in London
With the CDN
~12 ms
Sydney → Sydney
- Visitor in Sydney
- ~10 km to the edge
- Cached copy, served
A CDN stores copies of your site at edge locations around the world, so a visitor is served from the city nearest them rather than from wherever your server happens to live. InstaHost runs 20 named edge locations across Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa. It is included on every plan, with unlimited traffic and no throttling.
Static content is cached for 60 minutes with cache warming. The network also optimises images to WebP, minifies HTML, CSS and JavaScript, lazy loads off-screen content and staples OCSP into the TLS handshake. It is our own network, not resold — which is why there is no third-party CDN bill.
Unmetered, genuinely
No bandwidth counter, no overage line, no throttle at a threshold you find out about afterwards. Serve what you serve.
The network →No Cloudflare bill
It's our own edge network rather than someone else's resold to you, so including it costs us capacity rather than an invoice.
What it does →It shrinks the payload too
Caching moves bytes closer. Image conversion, minification and lazy loading mean there are fewer bytes to move.
Optimisation →Shorter path, less power
Every router the data doesn't cross is energy not spent. The fastest route happens to be the greenest one.
The energy case →You cannot make light faster.
You can make the journey shorter.
Most of what people call "a slow website" is a packet crossing an ocean and coming back. No amount of server tuning fixes geography — only moving the copy closer does.
If all your visitors are local, say so and we'll tell you it matters less.
A visitor in the same city as your origin was already close, and the CDN will not transform their experience. What still helps them is the optimisation work — smaller images, minified code, lazy loading, a faster TLS handshake. Smaller gain, not no gain, and it costs nothing either way. We would rather say that than imply every site doubles in speed.
Twenty locations. Named.
Providers advertise "45+ global locations" without listing one of them. Here is the actual list, so you can check whether your customers are near any of it.
Caching is half of it.
Moving bytes closer is the obvious win. Sending fewer of them in the first place is the other one, and it happens automatically.
The shortest route
is also the cleanest one.
A CDN is sold on speed, and speed is what people buy it for. It happens to be one of the few performance decisions that also reduces how much electricity a page view costs.
We are not going to claim a CDN offsets a data centre. It does not. What it does is stop a page view dragging data across half a planet when a copy could sit in the next postcode — and at the scale of a million page views that is a real number rather than a gesture.
Renewable since 1996.
Thirty years of the same answer, which is longer than most of the companies asking the question have existed.
Straight answers.
Is the CDN really free?
Yes, on every plan — unlimited traffic, no throttling, no bandwidth meter, no overage line. It runs on our own network rather than being resold from a third party, which is why we can include it instead of passing on somebody else's invoice. Comparable third-party plans run about £15–£20 a month.
Where are the edge locations?
Twenty, all named. London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid; New York, Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami, Mexico City; Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore; Sydney; São Paulo, Santiago; Johannesburg.
We'd rather list them than advertise "45+ locations" nobody can check. The full grid →
How much faster will my site actually be?
It depends entirely on where your visitors are, and anyone quoting one number for everybody is guessing.
Same city as your origin: almost no difference — the request was already short. Other side of the world: a great deal. Sydney to London is ~17,000 km and roughly 280 ms; the same request from our Sydney edge is about 12 ms.
What gets cached, and for how long?
Static content — images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts — for 60 minutes by default. Cache warming means once one visitor pulls a page through a node, the next visitor to that node gets a cache hit on their first visit.
Can I clear the cache when I publish?
Yes — instantly, from the control panel, forcing every node to refetch. There's also a development mode that disables caching while you work, so you're not chasing stale files mid-deployment.
What does it do besides caching?
It shrinks what it serves: images resized, compressed and converted to WebP; HTML, CSS and JS minified; off-screen images lazy loaded; and OCSP stapling folding the certificate revocation check into the TLS handshake so the connection establishes faster. All of it →
Does it help SEO?
Indirectly but genuinely. Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor and Core Web Vitals are measured on real user experience — so your visitors' physical distance from your server feeds your scores. Google's own figures put abandonment probability up 90% when load time goes from one second to five.
I only serve my local town. Do I need it?
You'll see less benefit than an international business, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. Leave it on anyway: the optimisation work — image conversion, minification, lazy loading, faster handshake — speeds up a local visitor too, and none of it costs you anything. Smaller gain, not no gain.
Is a CDN better for the environment?
It is, and it's one of the few performance decisions that also is. Serving from an edge node in the visitor's city means the data crosses far less network infrastructure than a round trip across an ocean — and every router it doesn't traverse is energy not spent. Compression and minification cut the payload on top.
Both origin and edge run on 100% renewable energy, as they have since 1996.
Do I have to change anything?
No. Enable it in a couple of clicks and it works with your site as it is. Individual optimisations can be toggled per site if one interferes with something unusual, and your preferred configuration can be saved as a template and applied across many sites at once.
Does it work with WordPress?
Yes, and there's a free caching plugin that purges the cache automatically when you publish or update. You don't need it — the CDN works without any plugin — it just removes the remembering.
Can I block by country or IP?
Yes, and because the CDN sits in front of your site, blocked requests are stopped at the edge before reaching your server. HTTP security headers are managed from the same dashboard, and the WAF and DDoS scrubbing run at the same layer.
It's already switched on.
Every plan includes the edge network, unmetered. Nothing to order, nothing to meter, and no invoice arriving from a company you've never dealt with.