Hi, I've recently been contacted by a content delivery network provider - limelightnetworks.comabout hosting my websites media (mainly audio files) on there servers to provide a "much faster delivery of content to the end-user" (not my words). I wanted to see if anyone has used such a service before and if so did you notice substantial benefits from using it. Thanks, Rookie
Well they are marketing their service, so you would expect them to claim to be "much faster." I don't see how pulling data from two physically separate servers could increase the response of any data served over the web though. It would seem logical that doing that would slow down the response time. Of course if their server is a mile from you and we are on the other side of the country it may appear to you that you are getting the data from them "much faster," but the experience will be different for every one of your users depending on their location. If your host had bandwidth or network availability issues it might make sense, but that isn't the case here. But if someone has used them and has a different experience, I'll shut up.
Haven't heard anyone using this service. I wonder how much do they charge?? I think if your users are all over the world, you may gain perfomance increase. In general, typical hosting company host your website at a single location and some users may see network latency. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
Well I spoke with one of their sales reps and technical support guys today and from what I gather they have the same pipe that discountASP has OC48. They spent most of the time talking about how there nation wide location and how they feed the media straight to the ISP which is supposed to make a "big difference". They cache the files one there servers nation wide and relay the data from the closest server to the requesting location. Overall I think that it might be worth while if your websites bandwidth requirements exceed 500GB a month, and since my site is no where near that (yet ) I don't think I'll be persuing it any further. They charge per GB of bandwidth and the minimun bandwidth purchase is 100GB per month. Then there are price breaks at 500 / 1000.
Ding... youTube would probably eat up 500G in couple minutes. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
"feed the media straight to the ISP" sounds suspiciously like marketing BS to me (since the request has to come from your site initially, then go to their routing system, then to the caching server then to the end user), but the idea of caching content on servers around the world is certainly interesting. I would assume they cache on demand rather than replicating every file on every server, so those initial requests for the file are still going to have to travel whatever distance to get to the remote caching server. Since they are caching it's safe to assume that cache is dumped after a certain time if no subsequent requests come in for that specific file, which starts the process all over again. I can see how that would work well for popular files that are constantly being accessed from all over the world, like the youtube-type stuff. But for a smaller operation I wonder if it would be a cost effective or even particularly efficient service, especiallyif the files have to essentially "re-cache" after a certain period of inactivity. But of course I'm just speculating as to how their caching works, so who knows. mjp DiscountASP.NET <SUB><SUP>http://DiscountASP.NET
