CDN.net Brings CDN Pricing Down to Earth

With the rise of cloud computing, more IT organizations have come to appreciate the caching capabilities of content delivery networks (CDN) that allow them to store copies of data much closer to where any user might be located. What they appreciate less, however, is the cost of those services.

CDN.net is looking to change that equation with the launch today of a CDN that allows organizations to pay for how much bandwidth and capacity they actually use versus a flat fee that is calculated based on how much they might use.

Built using a federated approach towards creating a CDN, the service relies on 30 different data centers that CDN.net has enlisted to provide access to servers around the globe. The end goal, says James Fletcher, marketing director for CDN.net, is to have 150 data center locations that will span 40 different countries.

Fletcher says the basic idea is to leverage all the existing server capacity in the cloud to deliver an extensible CDN that costs much less to manage and operate. As a unit on OnApp, CDN.net is leveraging cloud management software developed by OnApp to manage the service.

Many organizations today don’t augment their cloud computing strategies with CDNs that can boost the performance of applications by overcoming network latency issues because existing CDNs require major commitments to usage. Most organizations that make those commitments, says Fletcher, also don’t wind up actually using that amount of bandwidth, which results in a wasted expense.

CDNs initially emerged as a way to cache multimedia content for websites. But as cloud computing continues to mature, it’s clear that CDNs will have a significant role to play in ensuring application performance in an age where Internet traffic has a tendency to bounce all over the place; that is, as long as most organizations can afford to take advantage of the technology in the first place.