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Suppliers from various technology sectors are plotting to disrupt the content delivery network market

Ditlev Bredahl is on a mission to bring content delivery network (CDN) services to the masses. The CEO of cloud hosting software company OnApp believes that the CDN market – which offers services to boost website performance – has for too long been dominated by a small cabal of “cocky” providers charging “crazy” prices.

He may have a point: CDN services from specialist, market-leading providers such as Akamai, Limelight Networks and CDNetworks are costly. But for companies that do significant business online, especially those that target international audiences, these services are an unavoidable cost.

At their most basic, CDN services take customers’ frequently accessed web content (for example, picture files, video clips or downloadable PDFs) and place them on the provider’s own high-speed servers, scattered around the world. Done well, higher-bandwidth content is moved onto servers that are closer to customers, delivering a hefty performance boost.

A good CDN service also provides protection for a website operator’s own infrastructure, wherever its customers are based. Take, for example, online property company Rightmove. When head of service delivery Luke West joined the company in 2007, Rightmove’s web servers were delivering between 10 million and 11 million pages per day, each offering numerous photos of available properties. Today, he says, that figure is closer to 35 million per day.

Rightmove could, in theory, use its own image servers to deliver the photos, but that option would place those servers under huge pressure. The bandwidth investment alone would be substantial, says West.

Instead, Rightmove uses CDNetworks as a ‘shield’, he says. CDNetworks’ servers deliver Rightmove image files from a pre-populated cache on its own high-speed machines, so that eager house-hunters aren’t kept waiting to view photography of available properties.

If a particular image has yet to be added to the CDNetworks cache, a one-off request for that photograph passes from CDNetworks to Rightmove, and it is then added to the cache to fulfil the request. “That protects our image servers from multiple calls for the same picture,” explains West.

Each month, CDNetworks handles around 160 terabytes of image data on Rightmove’s behalf. To put that in perspective, it’s enough to fill 36,000 standard 4.5 gigabyte disks.

Rightmove is very happy with the service it receives from CDNetworks. Luke West has tried other CDN services and found them to be either more expensive or slower, or both. An important element for him, he says, is the responsiveness of the provider’s team. “They need to be people you can do business with, who get things sorted when you’ve got problems,” he says.

Offsetting capital costs

According to OnApp’s Bredahl, all is not well with the CDN model. He says that while this kind of service is not that complex to provide, it is hugely capital-intensive for the CDN providers, requiring them to own and maintain substantial server assets in multiple locations worldwide.

This means that they need to lock customers into long-term contracts. Customers are typically expected to sign up for a contract of at least one year – longer if they have haggled down the price. “This is not an opportunity for month-to-month, cloud-based tariffs,” Jeff Kim, CDNetworks’ chief operating officer for the US and EMEA, told Information Age.

Some companies, such as Rightmove, are happy to pay a premium and make a long-term commitment in return for the best possible service. For others, this is not an option.

In August 2011, OnApp unveiled what Bredahl claims is a cheaper, easier way for web hosting providers to offer CDN services to small and medium-sized companies. OnApp’s new CDN software – acquired in the company’s purchase this summer of Aflexi – enables hosting providers to create local CDN ‘points of presence’, or PoPs, on their own servers. At the same time, they become part of a wider federation of other hosting providers worldwide, all running the same software, where members can buy and sell spare CDN capacity on demand.

Meanwhile, a software-as-a-service offering hosted by OnApp – CDNaaS (CDN as a service) – determines which local servers in that federation are best suited to deliver content to end-users, based on the status of those servers and their location.

That may sound like a hassle for hosting providers, but it’s a chance to offer CDN services to customers who need them but can’t afford to buy from established providers and, at the same time, make money out of their spare hosting capacity, Bredahl says.

For end-user organisations, it is a chance to get rapid delivery of web content from hosting providers that they already do business with, “who understand their business and their current website set-up, and who can provide support as part of their existing relationship”.

One hosting provider that has signed up to OnApp’s systems is PEER 1 Hosting. “We haven’t launched our CDN service yet, but we’re seeing a lot of demand and expect very good take-up,” says Dominic Monkhouse, EMEA managing director of PEER 1. “Any company that cares about its visitors’ user experience needs CDN.”

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