Very shortly some of our customers will take part in a beta program to validate our new Content Delivery Network (CDN) product. This is another step in a continuing program at Leaseweb to offer internet technologies, which can efficiently deliver content to users. CDN leverages our high quality, high bandwidth network with an advanced implementation of CDN to meet Leaseweb client requirements.
CDN is a scalable method to efficiently utilize network connectivity to deliver a wide range of content to customers. Content may include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, and documents), and applications. Leaseweb CDN easily copes with bandwidth peaks, scaling quickly and efficiently to meet high content delivery requirements, while eliminating the need for customers to maintain extra internet infrastructure to meet excess demand periods. CDN offloads content from customers’ servers allowing the efficient management of content delivery through their customer portal, utilizing Leaseweb CDN edge servers.
The Leaseweb CDN offers special advantages to Leaseweb customers because it provides an affordable quality internet delivery infrastructure on demand. The CDN offers flexible, scalable expansion, as required, to deliver content to users. It is primarily designed for static content. The product allows many advanced CDN features for customers including: user specified bandwidth throttling, content protection, and password security. Download links can be set to expire for content with limited availability.
The Leaseweb Product Development department has been tasked with the design of an effective CDN platform for file-based content delivery in consultation with customers to ensure the system met all user requirements. Over the last months we have been engaged in a dialog with key customers to determine the most desirable parameters of a Leaseweb CDN. This continuing effort, involving our programmers and infrastructure staff, resulted in the development of our new CDN product. The Leaseweb CDN platform is customized to meet customer requirements and offers many advanced CDN features for a competitive price. Our internal tests demonstrated excellent load and bandwidth utilization. Leaseweb CDN is now ready for live beta testing.
In the most basic implementation, customers point the URLs of their file-based content to the Leaseweb CDN. Utilizing their customer portal, clients are quickly able to configure the CDN to obtain the content from customer servers. All external requests to the content will be re-directed to Leaseweb CDN edge servers. This allows customers to withstand large traffic and visitor spikes, with low impact on the customers’ own server and network. Leaseweb maintains the CDN infrastructure, giving the customer more time to deal with their business, customers and content, without having to deal with many content delivery system issues.
Traditional CDN solutions focus on streaming video. Leaseweb decided for the initial product iteration to build a file-based CDN that offers pseudo-streaming and progressive downloads, since this is what most Leaseweb customers currently require. After the beta phase, the CDN will complement our server and bandwidth offerings, by allowing customers to maintain a smaller infrastructure, and economically offload the distribution of content to the Leaseweb CDN.
At the completion of the beta test, Leaseweb will offer CDN as part of our product portfolio, and all of our customers will be able to integrate CDN options into their current services, as required. In addition, we will add more POPs and additional features to provide Leaseweb customers with the full range of CDN options to meet their entire content delivery requirements in the future.
Darren H
October 5, 2010 at 1:04This is very exciting news.
As we have just started a massive colocation project with Leaseweb, with new advances like this and a network of 1.2Tbps and expanding, you are definately going to be the biggest, fastest, widespread network in the world.
Fantastic people to deal with, always improving your services – what can I say except it’s a pleasue to do business.
Daniel
October 18, 2011 at 18:32Is this CDN active already?
Robert van der Meulen (Manager Research & Product Development) • Post Author •
October 20, 2011 at 16:01The CDN is not active yet, but we are actively beta testing.
Right now, we are using our CDN as the primary Mozilla mirror for North-America and Europe, processing roughly 2 million downloads an hour (much more after new FireFox releases :) ); we’re also working on features together with a small number of beta customers.