Hi,

I need to publish large amount of small files.
Each file is between 10K-1M, and I have around 200,000 files.
The files will be updated approximately once a day.

Will CDN be any good for this purpose?
If yes, which one do you recommend?
Anyone is familiar with Cotendo CDN?

Thanks

I'm curious as well if a CDN would be a good thing to have in this case.

If you're just serving small files, they shouldn't take *long* to download even if the people downloading are across the world (versus downloading from a "local" mirror from a given CDN).

On that note, I have used Cachefly before and it seemed to work pretty well. They tend to always be running a 30 day free trial so you can try it out before you commit to paying for the service.

CDN will be definitely useful , it even reduces the load on your server . I think origin pull is enough as the file size is small.

One of the ideal use cases for a CDN is to serve up the many small(ish) static web furniture files that comprise a page. This is because latency kills if you cannot pipeline the connection(s).

However, where you have to update a large number of files daily, it might not be such a good fit. This is especially the case if the file utilisation rate is low.

Yes, CDN will be useful for your requirement

Yes, a cdn will improve website loading and reduce server load. There are many options around. The cheapest was simpleCDN, but now they have a different pricing model.

You might want to ask if they do http redirection, that may have adverse effect on small files instead of improving performance.

It all depends on the synching time - ask CDN about how long would it take to sync your new batch of files. If updating will happen too frequently - some CDNs won't be able to handle that properly (propagation issue). It also depends on caching technologies, caching vs forced propagation.

Haven't heard about that specific CDN.

Yes, a cdn will improve website loading and reduce server load. There are many options around. The cheapest was simpleCDN, but now they have a different pricing model.

I miss their old pricing model :(

Anyway, I'm currently self-hosting ~2m images between 10-20kb along with the sites that display (20+ images per page, 500k pageviews/month) and some other sites which amount to another 25m hits/month. (yay for cool graphs)

I don't think it'd be economical for me to move them over to a CDN when page loads average under 3 seconds (says google webmaster tools labs thing) and the server is in no way struggling. It'd just be another cost with very little added benefit for myself or my visitors.

How much bandwidth do you use? Is your server struggling to handle it? If I understood it correctly you're re-generating all the images once a day?

If you can justify the cost - go with it, but from what you've described it's not an exceptional amount of traffic, nor can it be easily cached for long periods of time which (being refreshed daily etc.)...

Thanks everybody.

Someone familiar with Cotendo?
They claim to have highend CDN solution.

There can be a Propogation issue (syncing as mentioned) that can take from seconds to minutes out to what the CDN techs call their "EDGE". When you up date files a lot that can be a concern. Ask them about that and test that in practice.

I'm using MaxCDN.com since they have a pay-as-you-go pricing model; helps to test things and just use it for a few months and see the difference.

hahahahaha sad boy cant spell properly

I vote he be banned http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=965695