nulik, welcome to WebmasterWorld. There's a current thread in our WordPress forum that drifts into a fascinating side discussion about the utility of CDNs... initially about security issues and how CloudFlare might be useful, and gets into how CDNs might provide many of the IT services that would otherwise require several servers and a full time admin. Here's the thread...

Where to Place WP Related htaccess Directives
https://www.webmasterworld.com/wordpress/4788195.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The post where the side discussion begins was posted by Senior Member shri on Feb 2, 2016, and is followed through by shri and various others until the end of the thread. Here's shri's initial post on the topic...

Would life not be easier for new / non-server admin types to use something like CloudFlare for WAF / firewall / IP restrictions? Their free and pro tiers are very reasonable and do a lot of heavy lifting that shared / VPS servers are just not able to....

As I read through the thread I get the sense that integrating DNS management into a CDN would save some extra steps that the suggested CloudFlare setups currently require. I'd further think that setting up a CDN with the thought in mind of using it as a front end for conventional hosting could greatly expand its scope, and if you made it easy to set up, you might attract a large group of customers.

This is by no means my field of expertise, and I've taken a lot of my cues from the posts of others in that discussion, included ergophobe, whose subsequent observations in the thread are key.

A few things

I am programming it in assembly language, to make it faster than any CDN existed ever

This *may* benefit to you in terms of keeping server costs down (assuming you can actually create a server that is faster than a server that has been optimized over the years for exactly this task, like nginx for example).

But from a client perspective, I'm not sure this is a selling point, because any speed gain will be small compared to what you get from
- fast network speed and a big pipeline
- geographic spread of the CDN - more locations = more chance machine will be close to user
- good geolocation/traffic routing, so that user gets the faster server

Those will, I think, offer most of the speed benefit and if done right will dwarf the assembly language vs higher order language.

Beyond that, I would say things that people will want
- convenience
- flexible plans
- easy integration with major web apps. Who is your target audience? Depending on your audience, make sure your CDN is easy to integrate with Wordpress, Drupal, Sitecore, etc

Then there are the "feature" questions that Robert_Charlton raises.

Cloudflare is, properly speaking, a reverse proxy that also functions as a CDN. So Cloudflare (and Incapsula and other Cloudflare competitors) are at origin reverse proxies that at higher tiers add CDN and WAF features.

So the question is would your CDN, at higher tiers, offer reverse proxy and WAF features?

So with a CDN you're going up against Cloudfront and that seems like a tall order. I would think it would be hard to impossible to compete with Amazon on price or geographic distribution and their massive size and geographic distribution is, in my opinion, going to have more of a speed benefit than you'll get from using a server programmed in assembly language.

So what will you offer that Cloudfront doesn't?

The obvious laundry list there would be to offer the things that a reverse proxy like Cloudflare offers - RP + CDN + WAF + DDOS protection, etc.

So if you start with Cloudfront and add those features, how do you know differentiate yourself from Cloudflare?

I have used Amazon CloudFront and MaxCDN, and now use CloudFlare. To be honest I can't think of anything different that I need/want. You'll have to find a way to stand out from the competition because they're pretty established players with servers all over the world already.

As Swanny said, you're going to need an angle. What do you think you can do better than the others are doing and how do you plan to keep doing it better once they take notice? Can you bring anything new to the table?

Asking questions in the forums is a good idea, here's an idea... make it lean and mean. When I want a CDN I just want images hosted, period, and dislike having to go through a bazillion settings for things I sincerely don't want anyway. I think there is a lot of wiggle room to make it simple but I don't think there's much profit in that though...

A mind reader option would be kind of cool.

A CDN by definition is one thing... and we have several versions already. As others noted, yours would have to be something special. (Wasn't kidding about that mind reader option!)

Or, more precisely: How many times does the wheel have to be re-invented?