I’ve been looking at using a CDN for a while now and before we launch our new site i wanted to see if i could integrate it with one. I’ve looked at amazon’s cloudfront, and unless i misread something, the files are uploaded only to one of amazon’s servers and that acts as the origin server for the edge servers… However, it would be highly preferred to have our site and server act as the origin server. We have a realtime backup solution and file management designed around our current servers. And so i don’t like the idea of the data being directly uploaded to a CDN origin server owned and run by them and leaving our servers completely out of the equation. What if the CDN company goes away? What if they experience a rather large network or system issue?..etc.
So, this leads me to the question of: Is there a CDN service that merely acts as a cache? Meaning our servers act as the origin server for the data, the CDN pulls from our server and caches the data on their edge servers.
I wouldn’t recommend using cloudfront unless you are already using S3 for your files. It’s really a royal pain to use otherwise.
Most CDN providers have a “pull” configuration which is the caching mode you’re talking about. That is how I use MaxCDN for WebPagetest.
That makes sense then. I was reading about amazon’s cloudfront and couldn’t figure out how so many are using cdn’s if they all operate that way. I see now that the feature i was looking for is called origin pull, with that term i am able to find a lot more cdn’s to checkout that work the way i want. However with your mention of maxcdn i checked it out and at their intial request price i see no reason not to purchase the service and start messing with it tomorrow. So thanks for pointing me in the right direction!