As mobile computing devices become the dominant means through which end users interact with web content, many organizations are more dependent than ever on content delivery networks (CDNs) to cache content at the edge of the network to better guarantee a quality end-user experience. Instart Logic this week announced it plans to substantially reduce the total cost of employing a CDN by making its core service available for as low as one cent per GB.
On top of that core service, Shailesh Shukla, vice president of products and marketing for Instart Logic, says, the CDN services provider will make available additional core services such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack mitigation and an ad integrity service that enables media companies to circumvent ad blocking. But the core CDN service that Instart Logic claims is at least 20 percent faster than rival CDN services such as Akamai will be delivered at cost, says Shukla.
“We’re moving CDNs away from being a simple transport and caching service to becoming a platform,” says Shukla.
Shukla says the Instart Logic service is faster because it makes use of both machine learning algorithms and image transcoding to deliver a better user experience across a range of multimedia content types.
Just as significantly, Shukla says, the Instart Logic CDN is also aware of the capabilities of the endpoint to which that content is being delivered. That makes it feasible for Instart Logic to deliver an optimal web experience across a broad range of mobile devices. That’s crucial these days, adds Skukla, because a much larger percentage of web content is now being consumed by mobile computing devices.
Whether Instart Logic has enough market clout to start an all-out price war in the CDN sector remains to be seen. But for those organizations that have previously found CDN services to be prohibitively expensive to employ, the rise of alternative low-cost approaches to invoking a CDN service might help solve a wide range of latency-sensitive application issues that continue to bedevil them.
