What matters most for Customers of Content Delivery Networks ??

There are so many CDN offerings in the Market Place today. This is due to the fact that there are more ways to deliver video content and get the same QOS.

The critical aspects in CDN that matters most for Customers are Price, Media Delivery Method, CDN Features and value added services. The other important aspects are Storage Capacity, Coverage Locations and obviously Quality of Service.

1.       Price for the CDN Offering

There are a variety of price structures offered by different CDNs. The customer has to assess how much data do they need to deploy their solution and decide on the final CDN solution.

	Amazon	Rackspace	GoGrid	SimpleCDN
Storage Costs	$0.15 / GB†	$0.15 / GB	$0.60 / GB††	$0.75 / GB††

On-demand storage is offered on a per-gigabyte basis. The data can be used for a variety of purposes viz.  General Storage, Back Up.

2.       Media Delivery Method offered by CDN Offering

As of today, CDN offerings do deliver HD-quality video, High-quality Audio through several streaming approaches. The Customer has to decide on what media format they need to support and also the streaming technology offered by CDN. This will be critical for their content distribution.

3.       CDN Features like Dynamic Site Acceleration, First Time Download, Analytics Software, Ad Delivery

There are so many features listed in the CDN offerings from different Companies. Here are some key features which can make a difference to the Customers.

Dynamic Site Acceleration: Services that enable enterprises to accelerate dynamic highly interactive web application securely resulting in improved performance and enhanced user experience.

First Time Download and Latency: First time Downloads and Upgrades form important criteria for Customers.

CDN Latency is a measure of time delay experienced in a network, when you send a packet on a round-trip (Source to the Destination & back again from Destination to the Source). Latency can be further enumerated as follows:

1)      Connect Time: When the connection is made using control protocol

2)      First-Byte Time: The first time the response arrives to the source

3)      Download Time: The time to download the entire file

There are several tools available to measure the CDN latency for a specific size of a file. Here is a graph, which compiles the latencies observed on current CDN offerings.

  

Analytic software: CDNs are also providing an ability to track usage statistics which will help you to deliver your content more effectively.

 Ad Delivery: Ad Services offered by CDN are as important as Analytics to deploy your Custom Ads more effectively.

4.       Value Added Services

High Availability of Stored Content

Better CDNs can ensure 99.999% of availability of your content.

Support of High Definition (HD)

Embrace high definition content delivery with a network that designed to meet the exacting demand of large file sizes and high stream rates.

Token Authentication

Secure your content with token authentication.

Flexibility

Support for multiple distribution options and file types including software downloads, large file delivery, bit-range requests, download receipts and secure delivery options.

Security

HTTPS support for shared and custom SSL certificates.

Scalability

Scalability in CDN refers to ability of the CDN to expand in order to handle a large amount of data, users and transactions without decline in performance.

5.       CDN Coverage

CDN Coverage refers to efficient content distribution across all servers kept in different geographical and strategic locations across the globe. There are possible content outsourcing & placement strategies adopted by different CDN vendors. 

CDN System Architecture - Relay Functionality