HTTP Blog

The amount of web traffic that plays a role in dynamic Internet content is large, and it has become much larger as users demand higher levels of personalization. It has become more important for content providers to provide information that is tailored to the specific needs of the customer. The biggest challenge with achieving this is the cost. With current technology, generating dynamic content can be quite expensive. It does not help that basic web schemes are not very useful for generating pages that are dynamic. There are two techniques that show a lot of progress in the field of dynamic content delivery. These two delivery techniques are Class Based Delta Encoding and Edge Side Includes.

A sizeable number of web pages on the Internet today are dynamically created. They will be created based on the profile of the user who is making the request, or it will be based on the attributes of the request itself. Users enjoy having their content personalized, and dynamic pages are becoming much more popular on the web. The biggest problem with trying to produce dynamic content is the fact that the pages are costly to produce, and the process of constructing the pages can be tedious. When a naive web delivery system is used, most request for information will be sent to the server. The latency will be much higher, and the consumption of the bandwidth will be higher than usual.

It is these factors that will reduce the success of a naive delivery system. Despite this, there are a few new techniques that have been proposed which can alleviate many of these problems. Some of these techniques deal with reducing the load that will be placed on the server, but may not have an effect on the traffic that will move through the network. Despite this, the best technique is one that takes this into consideration as well as network savings and the caching of important parts of the content. The Edge Side Includes is a technique that was promoted by Oracle. It is specifically related to the assembly of a page.

The goal of ESI is to allow for the assembly of a page that was created from smaller pieces, or fragments. The fragments can be transferred independently of each other, and they can be cached once they are in close proximity of the client. Unlike most techniques which simply generate an HTML page as a single unit, the server will create ESI fragments that will each have the HTML code for the fragments with special directives, directives that are ESI based. The fragments will be cached on distinct edge servers, and these servers will be responsible for the assembly of the page. The assembly will be performed based on the directions that are placed in the fragments by ESI.

The second system is called class based delta encoding. With this method, the server will create a number of distinct base files. When a client makes a request, the server will create an instance of the page, and a special device will be responsible for finding the best file to be used with this specific page.

Many popular websites and blogs have some serious problems with uptime and reliable hosting. Some hosting services are just, plainly put, bad yet others simply suffer from issues with bandwidth and reliability. Using a Content Delivery Network can definitely help with uptime, as well as decrease the load on your shared hosting account or dedicated host. You can increase download speeds from your site using a Content Delivery Network.

Using a Content Delivery Network to store and deliver much of your static content to the user is one of the easiest ways to decrease your server load, and increase server access and reliability. Static content such as: images, PDF files, and other downloadable content all create a lot of requests to the server as well as require a lot of bandwidth. Moving all this static content to an independent Content Delivery Network removes much of the load caused by image and other content static requests and decrease loading times. Because Content Delivery Network are distributed across multiple servers the load is shared between all the server hardware as well as each servers dedicated bandwidth. This reduces stress on each server, making it less likely that the server will crash and increasing overall reliability. Having content hosted on multiple servers decreases the chances of your content hosting going down, because if one server goes down one of the other servers is instantly able to take all the traffic in its place.

Uptime is very important to any webmaster because if your website or blog is down no one can access it. Keeping a website operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is unbelievably important and using a Content Delivery Network ensures quality uptime. As mentioned before, Content Delivery Network store your content on multiple servers, each located in a different physical location. Every server failing at the same time is nearly impossible, and as long as at least one of the servers in your Content Delivery Network is function all content will be accessible to your website.

Not only does using a Content Delivery Network help with uptime and reliability, it also helps with access speeds. By distributing your content across multiple servers it is much more likely that a user will connect to a server which they can access quickly. Unlike a single point access system, not all viewers will load your website from the same physical server. By distributing the content you also remove the stress caused by a single user downloading a large file, enabling other users to access the rest of your content without a slowdown.

Overall using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a great idea for your website or blog. Content Delivery Networks can easily increase reliability of your hosting, increase your server uptime, and increase speeds. All three of these are greatly desired by any webmaster, and a Content Delivery Network is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to achieve all three for your site!

We have partnered together with Streaming1 to delivery our on-demand video and streaming files to end-users in Europe much faster and for lower fees than any of our competition.
Streaming1 has the ability to stream on-demand the following formats:

* Windows Media Network
* ShoutCast
* QuickTime
* IceCast
* Real Media
* aacPlus

The highest streaming benefits would be for users located in Germany, Italy, France, United Kingdom, but all EU end-users will experience much faster streaming service than hosting in USA.

Squid is very good for putting it in the front of your current web servers, thus accelerating the content that doesn’t change that often. Depending on your web site configuration and hits, I suggest you go for 2GB or even 4GB of RAM for the squid(s) front-end accelerator servers. The best benefit is to have most of the cached content into the memory – this is the best and fastest method. IO is kinda slow and that is why you need a lot of memory.

A lot of folks have been doing this for years and squid has been reliable and fast enough for these needs. Install it on your server and see the performance raising immediately. You may also need to review nginx for proxying. Very good and fast daemon.

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 bandwidth pricing from multiple locations world wide and it 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 bandwidth rates, for example, for static image, download files, ISO images and other content serving.

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.