Forum Moderators: phranque
I run a dynamic site with lots of editorial content that get acceptable traffic for our target market (around 1.2M page views per month). Occasionally, however, Yahoo! News or Google News will link to us, bringing down the site in a classic Slashdotting. Our problem is NOT serving media files like videos, which is what most CDN aim to do, but in serving plain old HTML pages when getting hundreds of simultaneous connection requests.
The site currently runs on a couple of powerful Red Hat Linux boxes; one box is dedicated to Apache and the other to MySQL. I would rather get a CDN vendor rather than add complexity to the datacenter (multiple servers, load balancing appliances, etc.) The leading CDN vendor is of course Akamai but they are expensive and require two-year commitments. I have also talked to Panther Express (not enough features) and MirrorImage (still talking to them).
Do you have recommendations for other CDN vendors? The technical requirements that may force us to go to Akamai are: we need to be able to serve SSL, and we need to selectively flush portions of the cache based on cookies or SOAP calls.
I understand that Speedera used to be the preferred alternative to Akamai, but then Akamai acquired it! The list of CDN vendors on the Wikipedia is kind of thin:
•Akamai
•Amazon S3
•BitGravity
•Cachelogic
•CacheFly
•Limelight Networks
•LocalMirror
•Mirror Image Internet
•Panther Express
•SAVVIS, Inc.
•VitalStream
•Peer 1 RapidEdge
Thanks,
Tom Davey
I've received bids from Akamai and Mirror Image. Mirror Image is less expensive and has an easier SSL implementation. They have some good customers, too, like the NY Times. However, Mirror Image's technical documentation is much less good compared to Akamai's. MI seems to lack Akamai's corporate polish overall.
Does anybody have any experience using Mirror Image Internet for edge-serving/content caching? I could really use a real-world recommendation.
Thanks,
Tom
