[imported_silkroad]

Originally Posted by john2k

I use a CDN for basically the same reason as you. Last month I offloaded just under 50 million image views to a CDN. The sole reason that I began using a CDN wasn't about the network latency benefit but was to reduce load on my webserver until my new server is built & colocated. Even after my new server is online I might keep images running from a CDN but am not certain about that just yet.

Actually we use a CDN for a number of reasons (not one reason).

• Global delivery from the CDN network (network performance, end user experience globally)
• Deliver static content from "other than" origin server (server performance, user experience globally) reducing load (CPU, memory, and device IO) on origin-server.
• Network robustness, more secure, content delivered from many nodes globally, not one node or a geographic cluster.

When I started this thread I was using Amazon CloudFront, but now we have ported to SimpleCDN. CloudFront performance is much better than SimpleCDN, but SimpleCDN is much, much cheaper, the near-real time stats are better, cache control is better and getting non-CDN-cached files from the origin server is much better than the upload to S3 AWS model.

OBTW, SimpleCDN mirror bucket service is now cheaper (and must less work) than most budget web hosting based solutions to server static content (and the mirror bucket concept is better that server-server object sync-based solutions, IMHO)

PS: I am now considering GeoIP-based DNS in the future, for distributing origin servers globally, but there is no rush for this at the moment.

I wish one of the free DNS providers like SiteLutions offered GeoIP-based DNS services. Do you know of any?

Cheers!

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Originally Posted by john2k

To see the real power and benefits of a CDN, we can use Highwinds for an example. They streamed coverage of the presidential inauguration to a peak of 625,000 concurrent visitors using 310Gbps bandwidth. They could have done this from a single datacenter, but the viewing would not have been optimal for some viewers due to the network issue.

RE: Highwinds

Highwinds does not appear to publish their pricing model like Amazon and SimpleCDN.

Also, since we are taking vBulletin forums, most forums serve small images (buttons, attachments, icons, avatars), CSS files and JavaScript (as static content).

Forums are not really applications that serve streaming coverage of presidential inaugurations (that is not really vBulletin). Forums, like vBulletin et al, generally have PHP/MySQL origin-server requirements and static content of small images (avatars, buttons, icons, attachments), CSS files and (clientside) JavaScript.

Bringing massive streaming content requirements into the discussion has very little to with a "normal" vBulletin application, frankly speaking, which would be 99.99+ vBulletin sites.