CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) and Cloud are huge buzz right now, especially as more and more providers establish themselves into the mix. Gone are the days where you were restricted to dealing with a large corporate such as Akamai and their ‘impossible to reach unless you have enough money’ or are ‘important enough’ for them to speak to you.
It’s perceived that Akamai are the best in the business at content delivery, as they have pop’s just about everywhere.
These days, CDN’s are popping up with resellers of the likes of Akamai, although some of them do still restrict who can use them – One such provider that I looked at recently, would only accept companies with either a USA or UK office address. So, humm, folks who want to test the service outside of those countries are plumb out of luck. No matter, there are others to test, Limelight resellers (aka Rackspace is one) and they allow you to test with no initial outlay at all, just paying for what you use bandwidth wise. Another CDN that I found over at WHT (webhosting talk dot com) is MaxCDN (www maxcdn dot com), who you can get started with by prepaying (currently US$39.95 for 1000GB of traffic). MaxCDN do origin pull too (more on that when I test them out and report back). Still hunting for an Akamai reseller that will sell to me, to do some testing to see what they are really like first hand.
So it seems that CDN’s are in reach by the humble sole these days, at a reasonable entry fee. Lets see how the signup with MaxCDN goes, so that I can compare their service to the rackspace cloud (limelight). More to come on this subject for sure. Probably the first place to start will be ‘Why do I need a CDN?’…
Hey Jason,
It’s been a while since I updated the blog, busy as usual
A lot has happened since this post, with some really exciting newcomers into the CDN market. http://www.cloudflare.com being one such newcomer. The service is free to start with and probably all most people need. Offloading your sites content to their ‘origin pull’ CDN and provides network filtering protection, perfect for wordpress blogs! No more getting hacked by common wp 0 days as long as the cloudflare folks keep up with the filters.
As far as pure CDN goes, I reckon Akamai are still the best, especially for asia pacific, but level 3, edgecast are all good too. Orcon run a CDN, but are only providing CDN services for large customers streaming requirements. Not sure when or if they will bring a product to market for the commoners – I left the building just last week, so I won’t get the inside gossip. http://www.web-hosting.com are going to release a cloudflare enabled hosting service, specifically targeting wordpress users, within the near future. You’ll just sign up and wordpress would be automatically installed with all the latest cdn and caching modules pre-configured. Could save some time with all those wordpress sites!