CDN marketing lists features. Production lists failures: a purge that did not land, an origin that melted on TTL expiry, a checkout cookie that got cached, a certificate that expired on one hostname. Choose against that list.
Start with the request you actually serve
A documentation site, a WooCommerce catalogue, a Next.js app and a live HLS stream are different jobs. If the vendor only talks about static assets, ask what happens to SSR HTML, Range requests and WebSockets.
Write down what must be cached, what must bypass, and how fast a change must go live. That is the shortlist, not a logo wall.
Footprint and the miss path
PoP count is not a scoreboard by itself, but a single-region cache is not a CDN. Aptranet Cloud CDN runs on 210+ points of presence, 200+ Tbps of capacity and 14,000+ peering partners, with 30 ms average latency worldwide.
Ask what happens when many edges miss together. Origin Shield, origin groups and serve-stale are how the origin survives a deploy or a viral URL.
Operations you will perform at 2 a.m.
You will purge, prefetch, rotate a certificate, map a domain and read logs. If those controls only exist in a ticket, you do not operate the CDN — you rent a black box.
Cloud CDN exposes distributions, origins, hostnames, cache, purge, prefetch, raw logs and managed or custom TLS in the Management Console and API.
DNS is part of the purchase
A CDN you cannot point at is a lab. Apex flattening, a one-second minimum TTL and health-aware records decide whether the cutover is an afternoon or a weekend.
Cloud DNS is optional. It is also the difference between waiting on registrar TTL and moving when the test hostname is green.