Yes, You Can Afford a Content Delivery Network

The public Internet is a marvelous system for communications. Businesses can connect with consumers and other businesses worldwide at a modest cost. It is the Internet that has created millions of business opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t exit. Unfortunately, like any other successful environment, the Internet has gotten crowded. So much so that you website may have slowed to a crawl. Are you permanently stuck in this traffic jam?

The short answer is no. There is not much you can do about the flow of data through the Internet except to get the best last mile connection possible and find a clever way around the congestion. Major content providers discovered years ago that if you can’t get through the Internet in a timely fashion, the best you can do is go around it.

But, doesn’t circumvention get you speed at the cost of losing connectivity with customers? Not if you do it right. The popular solution is called a content delivery network or CDN. This network doesn’t connect directly with the end user. Instead, it bypasses much of the Internet and delivers content as closely as possible to the service providers. You still have potential issues of congestion within the provider’s networks. Even so, the speed up in performance is dramatic.

Who uses content delivery networks? Big content producers mostly. That includes companies delivering streaming and downloadable video and audio feeds and large software packages. CDNs are a big solution for big operations. So that leaves the small and medium e-commerce companies out of luck, right?

Not any more. Now there is a CDN solution anyone can afford. It’s called MaxCDN . Packages start at under $40 a year. You see that correctly. It’s $40 a year, not a month. That’s cheaper than a lot of backup solutions used by small businesses and consumers. What do you get for your money? Let’s take a look.

MaxCDN puts your content as close to the user as possible. They do that by running a network of content servers located around the world. Right now, when someone clicks on a link within your website, your server downloads the files necessary to reproduce the page through the Internet across whatever distance is between you and the user. Time delays are introduced along the way from routers and switches in the network and the speed of transmission through optical fiber. Users who are physically close to your server get faster loads than users who are thousands of miles away.

MaxCDN gets around these delays by having multiple servers loaded with copies of your large static files, such as images, JavaScript files and style sheets. The system is smart enough to know where the user is located and to serve the file copy closest to the user. This minimizes the latency between server and user to significantly speed up load times. You can speed up your website by seconds, even make it load 2 or 3 times faster than it does now. This results in happier, better conversions and increased revenue for you.

MaxCDN gives you an easy to use control panel to manage your account with performance reports to show just how much the service is helping. You also get plugins and custom setup to make setup fast and easy.

Are you frustrated that your users are going away because they haven’t got the patience to wait for your site to load? An easy solution my be at hand. Check out the features and benefits of MaxCDN now and see if it might be of immediate benefit to your organization.

Your Own Private Information Superhighway

We’re all familiar with the metaphor of the Internet as the Information Superhighway. It’s an apt description. Like a national road system, the Internet will take you anywhere. It’s even better than the Interstate highway system. The Internet goes worldwide with no worries about how you get across oceans and mountains. You can depart from any destination and reach any other destination in a reasonably efficient way.

Just like any superhighway, the Internet has it snags. First are traffic jams. You know how you’re cruising along on a interstate road trip and, all of a sudden, stop lights appear on the cars ahead. Traffic slows to a crawl for inexplicable reasons. Eventually you discover that the cause was an accident blocking the roadway or construction you didn’t know about. At certain times, the carrying capacity of arterial roads branching out from big cities is exceeded and traffic is bumper to bumper for miles and perhaps an hour or more.

Not much is different on the Internet. Traffic may zip along unimpeded on the fiber backbones, but slows to a crawl at choke points. Last mile access networks are particularly limited. Shared bandwidth means everybody pokes along when too many people want too many packets at the same time. The limited capacity of wireless broadband networks often stretches the definition of “broadband.”

Another “feature” of the Internet is that there are no fast and slow lanes. All the lanes treat all traffic equally. That’s great for big data files, the semi-trucks of the Internet, or video downloads, the equivalent of passenger cars. There are millions of them and they pretty much dominate the road. How about the ambulance that has to get to the hospital without interference? Emergency traffic has preference on the physical highway. On the information highway, it gets in line with everything else. You might say that our real superhighways have some class of service (CoS) controls. None of that is available on the Internet. If you have sensitive traffic, like real time voice or video that needs preference, it won’t get preferential treatment and will wind up as damaged goods.

Are there the equivalent of commuter lanes on the Internet? Nope. All lanes are the same. What some high volume content producers do is augment the capacity of the Internet with private roads that parallel the Internet and connect to it near the off ramps to their customers. These private carriers are called content delivery networks (CDNs). Without them, the internet would be even more swamped than it already is and video streaming would be impacted to the point where it just wouldn’t be worthwhile.

This is one example of a private information superhighway. Content delivery networks pick up traffic at your location and deliver it to distributors such as satellite and cable companies, who then merge it onto their broadband networks along with other Internet traffic. You have to pay for this convenience, but it can be well worth it to ensure that your high value content streams and downloads smoothly.

Another example of a private information superhighway connects only paying customers and doesn’t connect to the Internet at all. This is the MPLS network. It is a B2B or business to business connection service that has no general consumer access. Who wants such a system if you can’t reach the general public? Companies that want to connect their multiple business locations to exchange sensitive proprietary data and in-house telephone traffic want exactly this type of arrangement. They also have separate access connections to the Internet to interact with customers through websites, e-mail, social media and the like.

Compared to the vagaries of the Internet, MPLS networks run like a dream. They are engineered to have enough bandwidth to meet all commitments at all times. Traffic is prioritized so that VoIP telephone and video conferencing get the priority they need to run smoothly. Latency, jitter and packet loss are minimized by design. Security is made much easier because of the proprietary nature of the network technology and lack of public access.

Are you finding that you really need a private network for your internal business operations to complement the public network that connects you to your customers? If so, learn more about MPLS and Content Delivery Networks to optimize your business communications.



Note: Photo of traffic jam courtesy of Tage Olsin on Wikimedia Commons.

Secure Hosting In The Cloud For The US and Europe

You’ve been investigating the benefits of cloud computing hosting, but have concerns about the cost and security of cloud hosting solutions. Let’s take a look at what a secure cloud hosting provider has to offer for clients in the United States and Europe.

FireHost has enterprise-class secure data centers in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, London, England and Amsterdam, Netherlands. They are interconnected by a secure private network and offer access through multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) Points of Presence (POPs) in major cities in the US, Europe and Asia. This offers special benefits to companies doing business globally who need the high performance of cloud hosted solutions.

You might think that this level of sophistication would price secure cloud hosting out of the reach of smaller and medium size companies. That’s not the case at all. One big advantage of cloud hosting is that it is enormously scalable from a minimal server configuration right on up to as much horsepower as you can use. At all times, you have the ability to rapidly scale up and down to meet rapidly changing business needs. You can even set the system up to automatically scale up your resources when you are close to running out of capacity.

If you processes credit cards or are involved in the healthcare industry, you are subject to special regulation. Not every hosting company is set up to meet the requirements of PCI DSS 2.0 or HIPPA. This one is. To support PCI DSS, they have an auditor friendly infrastructure, managed SSL service, application and database server isolation, two-factor authentication, managed antivirus protection and continuous vulnerability monitoring. These same features plus business association agreement friendly solutions makes it easy for you to meet HIPPA requirements for protecting people’s healthcare information.

Enterprise security is included with all size cloud hosting plans. It is VMware based. Hardware firewalls lock down all unnecessary ports with only ports 80 & 443 open for Web servers. You have to option to open other ports at your own risk. Your cloud server is protected by VPN with SSL encryption. The VPN client is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. A web application firewall actively protects websites and applications from sophisticated hacker attacks such as SQL injection, session hijacking, cross site scripting, distributed denial of service, zero day web worms, directory traversal, cross-site request forgery, brute force login and more. Suspicious activity is automatically blocked.

Managed support is available 24x7x365. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) offers 100% network uptime, 100% infrastructure uptime and 1 hour hardware replacement. Their SAS70 Type II compliant certified data centers feature backup UPS power with backup generators to backup the UPS. Multiple Internet providers are employed to ensure continuous network connectivity. There are no support charges or hidden fees for fully managed support services. FireHost manages the physical environment, network, operating systems, databases and web servers. You manage your Web applications and custom applications. Managed 14 day backup is included.

You are probably wondering how affordable this level of secure hosting really is. Would you be surprised to learn that you can get a cloud server starting at $200 per month with no setup fees and no contract? Amazing but true. Scale up to a maximum of 84 GB memory, 8 cores and unlimited disk space as you need it. 1 TB of bandwidth is included. You can buy more if you need it for extremely large applications.

You can easily pay more for a non-cloud server and have none of the benefits included with secure cloud hosting. Plus, HIPPA and PCI compliant secure hosting is available at reasonable prices if you need them. Can you really afford to run your own data center or use standard hosting services anymore? Get secure Web servers with managed hosting starting at $200/mo. now. Check out the HIPPA and PCI packages as needed.

10 Gigabit Ethernet For Business

Is it possible that Gigabit bandwidth services aren’t enough to support your business? These days that’s entirely possible. The proliferation of video content and a migration to the cloud that’s picking up steam make old assumptions about WAN bandwidth obsolete. Today, 10 GigE connections are perfectly reasonable.

Just a few years ago, 10 Gigabit bandwidth was a basis for core transport networks. Now that speed is 100 Gbps. Even 40 Gbps is being left in the dust. Bandwidth levels at 10 Gbps are now available for both metro and long haul connections.

Don’t need a full 10 GigE right now? How about fractional 10 GigE? These are bandwidths between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Fractional bandwidth services are much more available with Carrier Ethernet than SONET. Ethernet is designed to be more scalable. Rather than specific standardized WAN speeds like OC-48 or OC-192, you can specify many granular bandwidths up to and including the full speed of the installed Ethernet port.

What’s available in 10 GigE connectivity? The point to point private line is typical. This is an optical bandwidth connection from your premises to somewhere else in the country or around the world. 10 Gigabit connections are useful for connecting data centers for data mirroring and high speed backup. Geographically diverse data centers are desirable to protect against natural and manmade disasters that can take out an entire area. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and toxic spills fall into that category.

The newest application for a 10 GigE connection is likely to be the most popular one soon. This is the connection between your facility and the cloud. Cloud computing services offer extremely high performance. It’s so easy to scale resources in the cloud that before long you can find yourself with Terabit processing and Megabit connections. Somehow all that data has to go back and forth between your offices and your cloud service provider.

Amazon Web Services has defined a service called AWS Direct Connect as an alternative to using the Internet for accessing their cloud services. This is a private line connection using a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port. The sheer size of Amazon’s cloud makes it logical that they would pioneer speeds of this magnitude. Other cloud providers are hot on Amazon’s heels, though, and it won’t be long before 1 Gbps is considered entry level and 10 Gbps is the standard way to connect to your cloud provider.

What about the Internet? The Internet has limitations as your path to the cloud. Latency and jitter are unspecified and uncontrolled. Bandwidth can vary when paths become congested. Companies are finding that for high performance applications the Internet is a bit too unpredictable. The more employees you have accessing the cloud, the more you risk productivity by using an indeterminate connection.

High speed Internet connections are a must for Internet service providers, content distributors and large e-commerce sites. The Internet is the only viable way to connect to the public at large. It will be a long time before individual users expect 10 Gig downloads, but large Cable MSOs and wireless service providers need that bandwidth level to divvy up among hundreds or thousands of users.

The same limitations that make the Internet unsuitable for cloud connections also make it unsuitable for massive content transport. Video content distributors have found that the only suitable way to electronically get their content to market is to bypass the Internet and connect directly to their customers, such as Cable and satellite networks. This has spawned the CDN or Content Delivery Network. The CDN is a private network that is designed to transport content at high speed to specific destinations. There is no public traffic on the CDN even though the content is meant for public consumption at the far end.

What does this mean to businesses? If you are involved in e-commerce, video production or distribution or Internet access services, you need a high speed connection to a CDN or the Internet backbone. This is where a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet line can be critical to your operation. That’s true even if it is only a last mile connection.

Are you feeling constrained by the bandwidth limitations of your current service provider? It’s time to get prices and availability for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to your business location.

The Coming Level 3 Global Crossing Juggernaut

If you believe that the future of business is high bandwidth connections to clouds, customers and suppliers worldwide, then the next step toward this future is the melding of Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing. Combine their assets and you have a network map that spans the world.

Level 3 Communications is actually purchasing Global Crossing for $2 billion. When this merger is complete, their combined fiber optic assets will reach 70 countries on 3 continents.

Level 3 has an extensive long haul network with metro fiber in many US cities. Their transatlantic undersea fiber connects to a European network to link the USA and major European cities with low latency fiber connections. Level 3 is a major player in the high speed financial trading space, as well as providing other high bandwidth fiber services for global business needs.

Another strength of Level 3 is video transport. Their Vyvx service carries both high definition and standard video programming for studios and networks. For the highest in transmission feed quality, Level 3 Vyvx offers uncompressed high definition video transport services between Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York City at 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps. The Level 3 Content Delivery Network (CDN) has 35 strategically placed cashing locations to keep the content as near the customer as possible.

What Global Crossing does is complement rather than compete with Level 3’s US/Europe network. Global Crossing has over 100,000 route miles of fiber optic cable installed around the world. This includes US and Europe network fiber that overlaps Level 3 to some extent. But it also brings trans-pacific undersea fiber and connections to Japan, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Connected to its North America network is an extensive fiber optic networking serving the major cities in South America.

Global Crossing is true to its name. Their fiber really does span the world. Add Global Crossing’s network to the Level 3 network and you have extensive connectivity throughout North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia, with some facilities extending to the Middle East and Africa.

What does this mean for you, the business user? It certainly means more availability of converged IP network services worldwide and specialty services, such as low latency routes and video transport. Both Level 3 and Global Crossing have been serving major enterprise customers and carriers. They’ve got the expertise and facilities to accomplish whatever you will ever need in the way of connectivity.

Level 3, especially, also caters to smaller and medium businesses in the US. Their T1, bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper solutions offer dedicated bandwidth at very reasonable prices. For companies that need to link multiple locations, Level 3 MPLS can create a company network that spans the country and extends to include offices, factories and warehouses worldwide.

Fiber optic networks are enjoying a new renaissance, as businesses move to cloud processes and automation that increases employee productivity. You see more fiber going into the ground in both major cities and rural areas. If you’ve been affiliated with Level 3 or Global Crossing, your connection capabilities are about to be increased significantly.

If you are looking to increase your connection speeds, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised by the wide range of services available and the cost reductions that have come about in recent years from these and other competitive carriers. Don’t assume that you can’t get or afford higher bandwidth, even fiber, until you get prices and availability for business bandwidth services appropriate to your facility locations.



Note: Image of Earth from over the Atlantic Ocean courtesy of the U.S. Government on Wikimedia Commons

Content Delivery Networks Transformed

It’s no secret that bandwidth requirements are increasing across the board. Much of this has resulted from the move to IP video streaming and downloads. It’s also a function of more sophisticated websites than what were envisioned in the early days of HTML. Now graphics are huge and sites are interactive, with all sorts of browser and server based application code. The issue has been how to deal with network bandwidth requirements that are accelerating with no end in site. One answer is to transform the network and the sites that use it.

Why isn’t simply increasing WAN bandwidth sufficient? Indeed, WAN bandwidth is increasing by leaps and bounds. In fact, the flood of packets on the Internet has resulted in such traffic jams that CDNs or Content Delivery Networks have arisen to create fast bypass lanes around the Internet superhighway.

Bandwidth is expensive. Both copper and fiber based network bandwidth prices have plunged in recent years. Even so, the demand to transport more and more data per user is causing many companies to increase their telecom services budgets to keep up. The end user has also increased their DSL, Cable and wireless broadband service speeds, but there is a limit to what they will pay and what is even available in many areas.

Two companies have teamed up to deal with this dilemma head-on. Level 3 is a global connectivity and content delivery network services provider. Strangeloop is a company that specializes in network and website acceleration. Combine a CDN with advanced acceleration techniques and you create a much faster network. How much faster? Up to a 30% performance improvement compared with what’s been available previously.

Note that this 30% performance boost is not a simple cranking up of network bandwidth. What these techniques do is actively manage three aspects of the process: network, delivery and code. Both Level 3 and Strangeloop actively manage how Web content is delivered to an end user without that user being aware that anything other than a simple file transfer is going on.

For instance, multiple copies of website files are hosted on Level 3’s Content Delivery Network and sent to the user from the most optimal cache server for that user location. Level 3 has 35 strategically placed caching locations. They also offer a streaming service for real-time content such as video.

Strangeloop goes further by actively managing how each page is rendered. They do things like compressing images for mobile viewers, increasing parallel data download from server to browser, reducing roundtrips by consolidating similar resources into single files, and delaying execution of non-critical scripts until the rest of the page has loaded and been rendered on the browser. Their process also lets the browser start downloading page resources while the server is busy generating the HTML page. Normally this is a serial process that takes longer than necessary.

Human nature dictates that the longer it takes for a page to load, the more people bail out due to impatience or mistakenly thinking that the site is broken and will never load. By speeding up the site rendering process so that users see the result in a second or two can dramatically improve the stickiness of the site and desired actions they take while visiting.

Are you frustrated with the sluggish performance of your site or streaming content because of too much information taking too long to reach your users? Perhaps you can benefit from the Level 3 CDN Site Transformer for enterprise users or other network improvements. Explain your need and get pricing and availability on high performance bandwidth services now.

Why Content Delivery Networks Need More Capacity

We’re in the midst of an enormous media shift. For those of us who grew up in the era of broadcast domination, this amounts to a revolution in technology. Nobody worries too much anymore about how to adjust the rabbit ears for best reception. Instead, they worry about 3G and 4G coverage so they can get their videos on the go. Cable and satellite TV, the successors to over the air delivery, now have to worry about the Internet as the connection of choice for both audio and video. If over-the-air delivery is waning, then what is taking its place? It’s the CDN or Content Delivery Network.

What’s a CDN and how does it relate to the Internet? A content delivery network works with the Internet, not as a replacement. The public does not connect directly to a CDN. These are privately run networks designed to provide high bandwidth combined with low latency, jitter and packet loss. They are designed for capacity and quality to support content producers and distributors. Thus, the name Content Delivery Network. They are designed to deliver content, most often in IP video format, from point to point or point to multipoint.

What CDNs do in take a load off the Internet and ensure quality of transmission for most of the distance traversed. Say a customer wants access to an HD video download or stream. You can try to jam that through the Internet and take your chances with traffic congestion and other quality degradations. Or, the provider can send the program over a CDN directly to the Internet Service Provider. The ISP, say a cable company, then gives access to the CDN delivered content to their customer. In this case, it could be through the Cable broadband service or the content could be used to feed a separate cable channel.

Sure, content can still be degraded between the ISP head end and the customer, but at least the service providers have control of that portion of the network. They can choose how to manage the bandwidth shared by their customers to ensure satisfactory video quality.

The media shift now in progress is gravitating toward most consumers getting their video services via cable or satellite rather than through over the air broadcast channels. That’s why you haven’t heard much screaming over the replacement of analog transmission by digital. It's not that those converter boxes are so wonderful. It's that the satellite and cable set top boxes that feed TV sets are capable of providing a variety of compatible analog, digital, SD and HD television signals. Old TVs as well as new are supported.

Digital HDTV was just one phase of the transformation. What’s happening now is that more and more set top boxes and television receivers themselves come with Ethernet ports for IP content. Plug these ports into an Internet router and the TV set becomes capable of displaying video content that never leaves the Net. Netflix is an example of a content provider that uses the Internet. So is YouTube. Even the broadcast networks are providing archives of already aired shows on their Internet sites.

This move from airwaves to broadband will likely result in more and more spectrum repurposed to wireless Internet service. At the same time, IP video content will increase and require a robust delivery mechanism. This is why CDNs are growing and will continue to for the foreseeable future. Level 3, one of the world’s largest IP backbones for content delivery, recently added 1.65 Tbps of global capacity and added Toronto, Montreal, Brussels, Munich and Hamburg to its CDN. Video content delivery is now worldwide.

Is your organization in the business of producing, distributing or delivering content to service providers or end users? If so, you have an opportunity to compare IP video transport services for regional, national or international connections. There is no charge for this complementary pricing and consulting service for serious business and organizational applications.

AT&T Sees the Video Tsunami Coming

It's been predicted that video is going to sop up every Mbps of bandwidth available, and soon. Even today, broadband providers are repositioning themselves to say that unlimited bandwidth usage doesn't really mean you get to pound your access connection every second of the day. At least for consumers. Today unlimited bandwidth has monthly bandwidth caps because the provider's networks really aren't unlimited. In fact, they're strained.

One company that has recognized this and taken steps to add capacity is AT&T. But not just general capacity to the Internet. What AT&T has done is to add 400 Gbps of capacity last year to its CDN or Content Delivery Network.

So what's a CDN? It's a private parallel network to the Internet. You know that the Internet is the ubiquitous high bandwidth IP network that connects virtually the entire world in one big mesh network. If we were using the Internet for it's original purpose of research, educational and government email and file transfers, any bandwidth limitations might be transparent. But even as the Internet has been expanded to accommodate commercialization and general access, high bandwidth applications such as video have advanced even faster. Content and Internet service providers alike have recognized that it makes sense to move video applications to alternate networks before increasing bandwidth congestion brings everything to a crawl.

Enter the Content Delivery Network. These are privately run networks that connect (mostly) video content providers to drop-off points as close to the end user as possible. The content bypasses most of the international Internet to feed local nodes of the service provider. That content is then merged with Internet traffic and sent to your computer via DSL or Cable broadband. As far as you're concerned, it's all coming from the Internet.

Who are these CDN's. Big names include Akami Technologies, Limelight Networks, Level 3 Communications, and, now, AT&T. With its massive installed network base, AT&T has a leg up in that it also provides last mile solutions as well as Internet transport and private line networks.

The model of a Content Delivery Network is also applicable to businesses. If you need connectivity among multiple business locations, the service you want is MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This is a private network arrangement that has the ability to guarantee availability and performance, unlike the "best effort" service you can expect via the Internet. You can also get private line point to point connections when there are only two locations involved.

Do You Need a Content Delivery Network?

The infrastructure to deliver content via the Internet has a way of growing geometrically. There was a time when a single PC and a few incoming telephone lines with modems were all you needed to create, maintain and operate an online Web service. Now you're wondering how you're going to afford the capital equipment, bandwidth and staff to deliver high definition video feeds coast-to-coast. Perhaps the most reasonable solution is to turn the job over to a content delivery network.

The content delivery network or CDN is a specialized service that's roughly analogous to Web hosting services. With hosting, you have the option to create and maintain your own Web server and enough bandwidth to accommodate the incoming traffic. Or you can buy that service. If you decide to outsource to a Web hosting company, all you need is enough Internet bandwidth to upload your content updates. The host takes care of server maintenance, environmental control, backup power quality and high speed connections to the Internet.

The reason to go with a content delivery network is the same as electing to use a hosting service. In many cases its easier, less expensive and faster to scale up than trying to do it yourself. The CDN builds and manages its own private network to store and distribute content over a large geographical area to many simultaneous users. They ensure that there is enough bandwidth to handle the demands of your application, be it software packages, streaming audio, or high definition video. In some cases, they have special arrangements with Internet Service Providers to directly peer with them. Content can move from the CDN into the ISP network, avoiding the public Internet completely.

There are different architectures that content delivery networks can employ. One methodology is to cache multiple copies of the same content on servers around the country. When you request a download, the network figures out which cached copy is closest to your location and available. Others distribute content throughout their own networks and coordinate efficient delivery. Load balancing among distributed servers helps to improve network reliability by being able to bypass a failed server and provide the content from an alternative location.

By the way, how are you set for access bandwidth? If your bandwidth demands now exceed your line capacity, find better deals on WAN bandwidth now.