Hey All,

Thanks in advance for lending me your expertise. I am in charge of a website for a clothing company. We have been experiencing very high demand on our servers whenever we release a new line so I am looking into using a CDN to prevent our server getting bogged down(our site is pretty image heavy) Now the company that is providing us with the CDN is telling me we have two options. We can either use the CDN server to host our content or we can keep the content on our server and feed the CDN from there. Here is a brief excerpt from their Quickstart Guide

"Your first step is configuring your origin within the Media Control Center.
EdgeCast provides the option of either storing the content on your own servers,
or having the content stored on our Premium Storage Structure. Storing it
yourself means you will not have to upload new content, and give you added
flexibility when using authentication that allows you to protect certain content
from being displayed. However, the downside of using your own origin is that if
your connectivity or storage is ever unavailable/down, our servers will not be able
to reach the content. Additionally, if your origin is performing slowly, high levels of
latency in the delivery of the content may result."

My question for you knowledgeable people is basically what situation will be most reliable for us. Our server company is telling me that it would probably be best to use our own server as the origin but the little disclaimer at the end of their guide worries me. We release our lines at midnight and all the kids know this and try to reach the site at exactly midnight. This is also around the same time we will be uploading the content since we don't put it up until its available for purchase. If kids start coming to the site and bog it down before the content has been picked up by the CDN would this crash our site? If our site crashes does that make the CDN useless? I was under the understanding that a CDN simply takes the first request and then all subsequent requests are routed to the CDN.

Sorry for the long winded post. I greatly appreciate all your help on this.

Thanks,

It depends on how you have configured your website. If you've simply move images to CDN, and your site is down, the CDN is useless. If everything is cached on CDN, then you are only affected when CDN is down.

I don't really think having the content to be hosted on CDN storage has significant advantage over your own server, other than the fact that your server might be down, which CDN would be useless too on an images-on-CDN only.

From a purely practical standpoint, you may be best off with the origin pull.

If the kids all pile in at midnight, then let the first few be disappointed, or have to reload. They'll get over it.

This is especially true if you update often.

Having said that, why not just put the images, style sheets, and javascipt libraries on another hostname like pix.example.com. A well tuned server can serve up statics until the cows come home without even breaking a sweat.

A trick to do an exact minute release is to use two subdirectories and rotate the new one in as the server content source on the stroke of midnight.

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the response. I believe that Plumsauce's idea has a lot of benefit. In fact the CDN quickstart guide involves setting up a CNAME so i think this is probably the route I will take.

Thanks again for all your help, it is greatly appreciated!