HTTP Blog

In last years many new Content Delivery Network (CDN) companies have been launched and pricing for content distribution is very competitive nowadays. There are still old CDN companies like Akamai that charge top dollar but offer very good and quality service. If you can afford to pay top-price, go for it. However, the small content delivery companies like ValueCDN charge as low as $0.07 for 1GB of content delivery. This is very competitive price for content delivery from multiple locations that really speeds up file delivery.

Using content delivery network company you will speed up your web site content delivery, lower latency and offer great low-cost bandiwdth rates - e.g. static images, download files, ISO images and other content.

It would be great if web hosting can be done with just one or two servers backing up each other with all the bandwidth one needs and having all the loads and traffic going through them. But that is really not ideal not anywhere close to what is real. With the growth of the World Wide Web and the traffic going through the net, server hosts just could not keep up with very large web sites or blogs. The way has been described by a few computing gurus in the past when they eschewed the use of neural networking architectures – using various servers cooperating with each other to share the load while each provide the best service to their nearest internet clients.

Content Delivery Network providers or CDNs have revolutionized World Wide Web performance that is not taking full use of both the cheap bandwidth offered by competing telecommunications bureaus and the powerful servers we now have.  Not really that powerful, but when working in cooperative mode such as what is found in CDNs, these servers can be awesome in the breadth of service they can provide as web host servers.

For sure, managing multiple services over a network is a lot more complex. Load balancing is one critical function of the CDN to make sure that not a single sever in its network bogs down due to severe traffic or computing loads.  This is basically the benefit of using various servers serving the same content using different physical locations.  This used to be the domain of large enterprise systems geographically scattered and this computing model lends itself beautifully to content delivery in the World Wide Web.

Multi server balancing uses the intelligence built into layer 4-7 network switches or multi-layer switches that identify incoming and outgoing loads to distribute over the servers they control. Traffic going into the switch gets distributed across server clusters with the end-result that loads are balanced; total throughput is increased and thus ensures hosting reliability and efficiency.

Client requests get routed to the server node nearest their location or to one with the least traffic if the content request is too large for other nodes to serve. Some special routing algorithms are employed such as Global Load balancing, HTTP protocol based request routing, and DNS Anycasting.  Proximity-based request routing is done using reactive and proactive probing techniques and connection monitoring. These are tools that form part of the systems used to manage CDNs.

The World Wide Web is now home to multimedia contents that are clearly defining the wave for future home and personal entertainment options that used to reside with cable and other broadcasting media forms.  News content delivery, music and high definition movie files, personal video and high resolution images as well as ebooks and presentation files for corporate and individual use have come to make content delivery over the net a technical challenge and a delightful multimedia experience for those who can get their content fast enough.

If you are experiencing problems with flash video hosting and getting errors because of the incorrect header value it may be that the mime type has not been correctly set-up.

Flash video files have extension .flv and mime type: video/x-flv

Edit your web server config and add this mime type setting.

High bandwidth means high expenses for the bandwidth and many companies are looking to Content Delivery Network service companies to cut down the bandwidth bills.

There are many Content Delivery Network (CDN) companies, for example, Akamai, LocalMirror, Streaming1, Mirror Image, UltraCDN, Value CDN and others, that push the content closer to the end user and offer better pricing in some cases.

CDN’s usually work like this.

They push static content closer to the end user physically or at least calculate the shortest path and/or lowest latency between the end-user and the cache.

In this case, the user is U1 (see the above picture), C1 and C2 - caches, S1 - real server.

User (U1) requests are all answered by DNS queries and all dynamic content requests go to server S1, while all static content requests are forwarded to C1 or C2. This is usually done by linking static content with a different hostname or sub-domain that resolves directly to the closest and fastest cache node.

For example, if you are located in Germany, a server in Germany servers all your static content while all dynamic content, for example, php scripts and queries are served by server located in USA. You pay less because it’s a local peer traffic, or less expensive transfer, plus, you get a better speed and lowest latency.