Cdn News & Articles

Google (news, site) recently unveiled its Page Optimization Service, promising anywhere from 20% to 65% page speed improvement. Currently on a free, limited trial, the service supposedly improves page delivery and loading time by distributing the load across Google servers worldwide. But at what cost?

The use of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has grown rapidly over the last decade, allowing consumers to become constantly connected. Despite the enormous market potential, the mobile experience that many organizations provide is nothing less than painfully slow -- a definite negative in the impatient world of the web. Content delivery network (CDN) provider Cotendo (news, site) has announced an offering that might help. Cotendo has announced an extension of its web acceleration service, the Mobile Acceleration Suite (MAS), that can significantly reduce page load times on mobile devices. 

Canadian startup Blaze Software, founded in 2010 and based in Ottawa, has announced the launch of its cloud-based Web Performance Optimization (WPO) service. Blaze’s WPO promises to optimize web front ends for organizations struggling to provide ever-elusive responsiveness in increasingly rich web applications with a growing set of delivery channels including tablets, smart phones, laptops and traditional computing devices. After a year of development and beta use by a subset of customers, Blaze and its services launch today.

The rise in demand for mobile applications and web applications can put a strain on data centers and bandwidth. To address the need to improve performance in cloud computing, IBM (news, site) and Akamai (news, site) have developed the WebSphere Application Accelerator, which will improve performance of web and cloud applications through distributed computing.

Cotendo, a site acceleration and content delivery network (CDN), announced the general availability of a cloud-based CDN, Cloudlet. The CDN provides better support for targeted and personalized content, a necessity for Web 2.0 style sites.

What do you get when a major cloud hosting service and a cloud optimization service team up? This partnership can probably be considered a match made in cloud heaven.

As we approach the end of the year, all the news shows and media resources love to look back at the current year trends/themes. So, in keeping with media tradition, it is time to look back and think forward. Here are three things I that believe impacted content management in 2010 and three predictions for 2011.

Microsoft's ASP.NET team has launched a free AJAX content delivery network (CDN) that will provide improved performance for your AJAX-enabled web applications.

The CDN is a network of edge cache servers around the world that stores Microsoft's AJAX libraries so your application can download necessary files faster, thus increasing web application performance.

This service is similar to Amazon's CloudFront CDN. The Amazon CDN is primarily targeted at small to medium sized businesses and developers who can't afford, and don't necessarily need, the more well-known, expensive CDNs like Akamai and Limelight. It supports the caching of images, css files, video and other static content.

Unlike Amazon's CloudFront CDN, the AJAX CDN is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and provides caching support for only AJAX libraries such as jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX.

Using the CDN is as simple as adding a couple of script elements to a page in your application that wants to access the AJAX libraries on the CDN. Also available are debug versions of the script. A single script is required to access the JQuery library.

You can get a list of the current scripts available on the CDN on the Microsoft AJAX website. Make sure you read the terms of use statement.

As libraries are updated, they will be added to the CDN.

If you are using ASP.NET 4, you can use the ScriptManager control to access the CDN. It has a new property called EnableCdn. If set to true, it will automatically request Javascript files from the CDN.

Learn more about how to use the ScriptManager control and  ASP.NET AJAX Preview 5 in Scott Gu's post introducing the new AJAX CDN.

Texas-based SoftLayer (news, site), a provider of on-demand virtual data center services, has just announced that it now offers Parallel’s (news, site) Plesk Panel as an option with its CloudLayer platform -- cloud package for storage, computing and content delivery.

With this new offering, SoftLayer says it has only got its customers interests at heart by offering them more control over their IT environments, but what they're also doing is cutting an even bigger slice of that great big pie in the cloud.

SoftLayer Technologies (news, site), provider of on-demand virtual data center services, has scored again. Earlier this year the company announced their partner status in the Microsoft Hosting BizSpark program in addition to the release of a cloud package for the enterprise. This month they were recognized by the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which listed them as a “Niche Player” for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On-Demand).

Each company in the Magic Quadrant was reportedly evaluated on its completeness of vision and ability to execute within: self-managed hosting, mainstream-managed hosting, highly complex managed hosting, global solutions portfolio, and enterprise applications hosting.

CloudLayer, SoftLayer’s set of cloud services and, in this case, recognition winner, includes a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Storage and Computing. All of these are available as standalone services or fully integrated with all other SoftLayer offerings.

“In my opinion, being evaluated in this report is proof that our unique approach is redefining hosting,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “Of course, our greatest pride and core goal is to provide solutions and scalability that make an impact on our customers’ business. But to me, being in the Magic Quadrant shows that we’re making a difference throughout the industry.”

SoftLayer (news, site) offers a range of server-based systems from plain storage to dedicated multi-processor servers. Now, it adds a CloudLayer to offer a wide-ranging cloud package to the enterprise.

SoftLayer announced additional features for CDNLayer, the company’s unique content delivery network. CDNLayer is a worldwide system of server nodes scaled and optimized for delivery of large files.

For example, if you have a dozen zipped audiobooks you sell via your website and the files average one gigabyte in size, Softlayer’s CDNLayer option may meet your needs.

The news that Amazon is now offering a low-cost CDN has likely excited many people. Aptly named CloudFront, this service is stirring up a lot of attention. In our overview of the new service, we outlined the basic steps to use CloudFront.

In this post, we thought we would give you a little more detail on those steps to help you get started sooner.

Well known as being the pioneer for cloud computing services, Amazon has released the beta version of its latest initiative — a content delivery network. Amazon’s CloudFront CDN is cheap enough that SMB web publishers are now able to serve their more popular content to their customers quickly and easily.

Wowza Media Systems, a software company that focuses solely on media servers, announced the availability of Wowza Media Server Pro Subscription Edition.

This new product features “friction-free” monthly subscription licensing for its industrial-strength media server. The goal is to make the process of streaming or hosting flash media services a “painless” and cost-effective option.