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Web Performance Optimization Discussions
61

They appear to be using OnApp to deploy their CDN. This service describes itself as “an easy way to monetize spare cloud capacity and bandwidth by selling it on our CDN marketplace.” Their map with POPs (pdf) looks very similar to the one on the CDN77.com homepage.

The same documents also answers your question on the DNS servers, Lennie:

[quote]OnApp CDN includes a global Anycast DNS service. Hosted by OnApp at 14 datacenters around the world, it automatically directs content requests from end users to the most suitable location.

An advanced decision engine performs DNS lookups and queries a geolocation database to establish the user’s location. It combines that with information about the status and location of CDN edge resources, in order to identify the most suitable edge servers to deliver content. There is a simple per-TB fee for trac routed through the service.[/quote]

CDN77.com appears to be on the other end of what’s described in this press release:

In other words, it seems they’ve built a CDN entirely from such marketplace resources.

62

I had also found something along the same lines. I just hadn’t had the time to confirm it yet. I thought they used:

http://www.aflexi.net/

But OnApp and Aflexi are partners or one company owns the other or something along those lines. So I guess it is almost the same thing.

I really like the idea of the marketplace. It makes sense. It helps drive the price down and adds lots of POPs. More POPs mean better performance as the POPs are closer to the users.

But it could also mean varried performance.

It only works well if companies like CDN77, “the Publisher” in Aflexi terms, choose the right POPs and keep choosing the right POPs each and every month.

It is basically nginx as a proxy-cache at each POP operated by a local hosting provider (“Operator” in Aflexi terms).

63

I noticed CDN77 is actually is on the list of customers at OnApp:

http://onapp.com/customers/

Can’t get more clear than that.

64

Nice find :slight_smile:

65

What is your opinion about using a “poor man’s” CDN? I am considering setting up a CDN on my dedicated server, so that all the images that load constantly on site www.abc.com will be pulled from another site on my server www.xyz.com. Will this help speed things up enough to be worth the effort?

Scott

66

@gfm, that’s really just domain sharding and it may not be worth it these days unless you are serving a bunch of resources. It was more important to do in the IE7 days when browsers would only open 2 connections per domain - now they will do 6.

67

It would also held with large cookies. As long as the other domain is ‘cookieless’ ofcourse.