Technology

Managed CDN load balancing and managed CDN | Lower Infrastructure Costs

Content Delivery Network
Managed Content Delivery Network

Thousands upon thousands of companies use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver their digital content faster to the end user.  One of the costs associated with using a CDN is hiring someone, or using an internal resource, to manage the CDN.  While this appears to be a necessary cost, there are other alternatives such as managed CDN load balancing and managed CDN.

Managed CDN Load Balancing

CDN load balancing is using a load balancing solution, such as Cedexis or Dyn, to load balance across mulitple CDN vendors.  This is great as it can reduce downtime to by routing around any down CDN pops and help provide the best delivery to your end user.  The problem is that the additional costs of the load balancer can cancel out the reduced management costs.

By moving to a Managed CDN Load Balancing solution you will be able to get the added benefits of 100% uptime for your content delivery and significantly lower costs of management.  You can typically choose to bring your own vendor(s) and combine them with other pre-defined vendors, or just use the pre-defined vendors.  This can also be a lower cost option of reaching mainland China versus contracting directly with one of the CDNs that delivers in mainland China.

Managed CDN

Managed CDN was briefly described above.  Basically you outsource your CDN requirements to a company that will determine the best CDN or CDNs to deliver your content and will manage the vendors for you.  Many content providers feel they can save costs be negotiating directly with a CDN, but based on recent market prices that I’ve seen, a managed CDN provider can often provide the same rate with the managed costs built in.

I’ve spent years selling and consulting people on CDN best practices.  If your’e interested in learning more about Managed CDN Load Balancing and Managed CDN leave a comment or email me at tyler [at] silist.com