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Content Delivery Networks: Agile and Economical

Most websites feature some form of rich media - a Flash promotional video on the home page, a video tour, instructional videos or "course-cast" lectures. Due to video's popularity many organizations manage hundreds to thousands of videos in the form of webcasts, podcasts, or entertainment.

As the amount of media on a website grows into hundreds or thousands of video or audio files, most websites run into a number of problems. The first challenge is often making media discoverable. The solution to this problem is making the media more search-able. Since media is inherently less indexable than HTML / Text (with current technology), search improvements are usually achieved with extra metadata like an abstract and/or a transcript.

When rich media traffic spikes the second issue occurs, bandwidth. Usually a few weeks or months after a web site's media initiative takes off the bad news tends to arrive in the form of either the first bandwidth bill or the call from the network team or both. Delivering media to large numbers of viewers can grow very expensive very quickly. I've seen situations where even a single event that draws lots of traffic can spike costs through the roof as well as severely impact web site and network performance. You can buy hardware and increase your ISP package to deal with these situations, but there are other options that make a lot more sense.

Enter the Content Delivery Network (CDN for short). A CDN is an external, 3rd party network of data centers, servers, and networking infrastructure that allow you to deliver media very cost effectively and usually with far better performance then could be built in an existing IT environment. There are major players like Akamai and LimeLight Networks down to much smaller or more specialized players. Depending on your needs, one of these vendors can provide a media delivery solution that saves you money and heartache.

CDN's offer a lot of other benefits like faster performance, better reliability, fault tolerance, etc. Any website can use a CDN and some CMS products support them natively. For example, Ingeniux's PodXite product includes seamless support for CDN deployment and integrations with major CDN players.

There are many Ingeniux customers using our Web CMS and/or PodXite media publishing products who find the need to use a CDN to control their media delivery costs. These customers are as varied in size as Microsoft, who publishes the Microsoft Podcasts site using Ingeniux PodXite, all the way to a small liberal arts institution who learned that offering a download of their commencement video can make for an expensive surprise in the campus IT budget. Whatever your size, if you have lots of rich media, CDNs might be a helpful arrow to have in your quiver of solutions.

Posted by Nathan Eggen at 4:00 pm