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  1. #1

    Help with which CDN to use

    We are a smaller ecommerce site with traffic levels of about 100k-200k visitors a month. We are about to launch a major celebrity endorsement deal in Feb. This person is on a major US network show that airs daily with over 1 million views a day. (plus all of their social following).

    We have no idea what levels of traffic to expect. Maybe it will be a HUGE spike, maybe not.. we've never done this before.

    So i have talked to my hosting company, they can upgrade our server to support 1000 max connections 5000 max connections 10000 max connections.

    And/Or I could add a CDN in the mix. I've been looking at CDNs. Ive never used one before.. but i like that can scale to whatever to load may be. Of course our server will have to handle certain dynamic features, but things like our images etc.. could be cached on a CDN.

    But what CDN? I don't want to use something like edgecast as we'd have to sign up for a year. I don't want to use amazon, as it appears they have no support and I'd really have to know what i'm doing.

    I've looked at cdn77.com and their pricing sounds ok. I've also look at turbobytes who'd pricing seems ok as well.

    What other options are out there? How reliable are cdn's? (the worst thing that could happen is the cdn goes out during our announcement and we are dead in the water!)

    Any other ideas and help would be greatly apprenticed. Thanks in advance.

  2. #2
    A CDN would be good for your user experience, but I think your priority should be to handle all the traffic that's coming in, since it sounds like there will be a lot..

    Regarding which CDN to use, maybe take a look at Cloudflare's business plan.

  3. #3
    do you mean just handle the traffic at the origin server and forget about using a CDN to handle some of the requests?

    Problem is i have no idea how much traffic to expect. We are all in dark here.. never have done this before. I'm working with the hosting company (pair network).. they can let us use (and pay for) a load balanced server to handle 10,000+ connections, maybe for a few months, then after the initial spike we where we are at... but I am afraid that we might go over THAT in traffic.

    Again, maybe i'm way over estimating the traffic we are going to get. I just don't know. I wish i could find someone who has gone thru something like this and could give me a number to expect.

  4. #4
    wouldn't a cdn offload connections? Meaning any image handled by the cdn will be an connection the server does not have to handle. Meaning the web server can handle more users at a time right?

  5. #5
    Join Date
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    Have you looked at the cloud services for Google or Amazon? Those services seem to be designed with the idea that you can scale your site processing needs on the fly. The tricky part of using them though is managing the costs!
    John Rasri
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Posts
    400
    If it were me, I'd simply sign-up with Softlayer/IBM or Rackspace. Their CDN's charge 12 cents a GB and it's fairly simple to setup. PAIR's CDN price seems around the same. So it might be worth it just to stick with them so they can help you with support. But, I am not sure who they utilize for their CDN offering.
    Last edited by mainpipe; 09-12-2014 at 10:48 PM.

  7. #7
    +1 for the rackspace CDN, very impressive.

    Predicting traffic for something like this is nigh on impossible, it's why cloud services where you can scale up and scale back on demand are so popular. A CDN would help BUT if your site has dynamic functionality i.e. reads and writes to a database, all that load is still going to be local.

  8. #8
    Site with traffic levels of about 100k-200k visitors a month - It's not enough data for understanding how much bandwidth you use. And amount of bandwidth used is the most important parameter in order to choose the proper tariff plan for CDN.

    Anyway, the right decision would be to switch the statics (pictures, videos, css, js) on CDN provider - this will reduce the load of your primary server, as well as it'll speed up the delivery of statics to surfers.

    You named several CDN providers. I can tell a lot about them. For example, let's take Edgecast. This provider offers a very technological solution. They have a very functional platform, with many features and add-ons that are required for technically complex projects. Their functionality allows significantly more than most other providers. An it costs money. But you need to find out what exactly you need from CDN - perhaps, it will be enough for you to get more simple services and therefore cheaper.

    Except the high price, Edgecast also has another minus - it requires a contract for a year. But there is a solution - Edgecast has several resellers that work on more flexible terms and can offer much better prices for for small / medium-sized customers. Search in Google "edgecast reseller" and you'll see what i'm talking about. Some resellers are focused on small customers, they have prices like $0.4-0.8 per Gb. If you are a medium or a large customer, then search for those resellers that are focused on large costumers and their prices are much lower. Besides, resellers work on "pay as you go" model - this way you have nothing to lose if you do not know how much your traffic changes next month.

    If i were you, i'd find 5 resellers of Edgecast and mail them your situation - they will offer you the solution and you'll be able to choose.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Netherlands
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    979
    If you want an EdgeCast reseller, there's Speedyrails, they charge 0.15 USD per gigabyte if I remember correct
    Hosting4Real - European (NL/FR) High Performance Web Hosting

  10. #10
    Speedyrails sells Dedicated Servers, Cloud and CDN. Little bit of everything.
    The price of CDN $0.15 USD per GB, perhaps, is one of the highest on the market. The same i'd say about the prices on Dedicated Servers.

    I don't know if it's allowed to post links here, correct me if it's not. Some ideas about the price level on CDN traffic you can get on cdncalc . com. You should recheck all figures from the site, but at least the list of some providers you can get there.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
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    Netherlands
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    979
    Quote Originally Posted by join View Post
    Speedyrails sells Dedicated Servers, Cloud and CDN. Little bit of everything.
    The price of CDN $0.15 USD per GB, perhaps, is one of the highest on the market. The same i'd say about the prices on Dedicated Servers.

    I don't know if it's allowed to post links here, correct me if it's not. Some ideas about the price level on CDN traffic you can get on cdncalc . com. You should recheck all figures from the site, but at least the list of some providers you can get there.
    The price might be high per gigabyte, but if you're looking for an EdgeCast solution, without contracting yourself for 12 months, then it's a pretty good solution, and works well.

    If you know any other EdgeCast Resellers, please share
    Hosting4Real - European (NL/FR) High Performance Web Hosting

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Hosting4Real View Post
    If you know any other EdgeCast Resellers, please share
    yes, I know EdgeCast Resellers with more cheap pricing

  13. #13
    When someone operates the number of visitors on a website (for example >1million visitor a month), there is a question - does this person know what he pays the hosting for?
    Websites with little amount of traffic usually use hostings with $1-$30 per month and people don't care how many traffic their websites use. They often even don't know that. Such websites don't need a CDN.
    People with larger websites usually know the amount of traffic they use. So exactly that amount must be indicated. Not ">1million visitor a month" but, for example, 122Gb per month.

    Usually hostings have tariff plans, where the main characteristic is bandwidth price. Then it's very easy to calculate how much the hosting will cost (in our case, CDN).
    For example, if a website uses 100Gb per month on pointed Speedyrails, it'll be necessary to pay 15 USD.
    If a website is large and uses terabytes of bandwidth, it makes no sense to use resellers, targeted at smaller customers. Otherwise such a customer, like this one http://prntscr.com/4wyfz0, for 1049 TB, which were used to download his video files, would pay monthly $161126 USD on Speedyrails. Agree, that $ 161к a month is too much.

    There is an incomplete list of resellers on this page http://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/edgecast/ and some of them are presented with their prices at http://www.cdncalc.com/

  14. #14
    how many web servers do you have ?

    you can simple let a domain contains multiple IPs so that the traffic be splited into multi servers.
    homehttp.com
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