Introducing ProCDN
December 28th, 2010 at 6:30 am
We are very excited to announce the launch of ProCDN, the newest addition to the (mt) ProDev product line. As we mentioned when we launched (ve) Server, we are continuing to build out our advanced product lines and ProCDN is the latest offering built to satisfy the needs of our advanced and performance-minded users. ProCDN isn’t a traditional hosting service but rather a globalization and performance enablement feature for your existing (mt) services.
What is ProCDN?
CDN or Content Delivery Network is a clever way to speed up websites and applications around the world. A CDN is essentially a network of storage and caching servers spread strategically across the globe containing copies of your website’s static content. The “magic” behind the system delivers your content from the geographic location closest to your users, drastically decreasing loading time for your site across the planet all while lightening the load on your origin hosting server. Do you have visitors to your site or application from Europe? If so, they would see copies of your data from the nearest European network, giving them faster access to your website.
To bring (mt) users CDN capabilities, we partnered with who we consider the fastest and most reliable global content delivery provider out there: Edgecast.
Do I Need a Content Delivery Network?
ProCDN has been in private beta for several months, delivering content for a wide variety of sites and use cases. Sites range from low to moderate traffic sites and blogs all the way up to some of the highest traffic sites hosted at (mt). Among many others, we’re providing content delivery for iPhone app content for some of the world’s most popular bands via Mobile Roadie, the most popular mobile app platform. We’re also the CDN provider for jQuery, the world’s most popular JavaScript framework.
The jQuery project has been very happy with the Media Temple ProCDN service. Running one of the top 500 most popular web sites can be quite challenging and using ProCDN has both made the process simple and very fast for our global audience.
John Resig, Creator of jQuery
The question of needing CDN or not really comes down to a combination of how fast you want your websites to perform, and how wide your user-base is spread around the world. We think ProCDN is a great addition to just about any website or service that feels performance is important.
Tell Me More… What Do I Get?
The network includes 19 points of presence around the globe, and when benchmarked, shows 25% faster performance than other leading CDN networks. Notably, we’ve taken a hosting feature that has traditionally been a contract-driven, expensive, and complicated addition to enterprise-level websites and made it simple, cost-effective, and readily available to websites of any size or traffic level.
ProCDN starts at just $20 per month and can be used with any of your (mt) hosted services. Here are a few key features:
- 19 global points of presence
- Increased SEO performance
- Full control panel
- Small and large file optimized
- Faster loading websites
- 200GB of monthly network transfer is included
- No contract, no setup fees
Ready To Learn More?
For the full rundown on all the product info, features, and pricing, head on over to the ProCDN product area.
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December 28th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
While I do like the way this service tied into existing (mt) customers’ accounts, I think its setup is unnecessarily convoluted. A fully-functioning S3 bucket with CloudFront distribution can be set up in a matter of minutes. There are dozens of standalone and browser extension-based S3 file managers, not to mention WordPress plugins that seamlessly integrate Media Library into CDN.
In case of ProCDN, those advantages are absent. Even the convenience of (mt)’s fantastic control panel is gone and replaced by something clumsy and unintuitive. ProCDN just doesn’t seem
As much as I would like to make the switch from S3/CF, I don’t see myself doing it until ProCDN becomes more like a service one would expect from (mt) and not GoDaddy.
December 30th, 2010 at 9:59 am
[...] ProCDN Posted by John Saddington on Dec 30, 2010MediaTemple, which powers The 8BIT Network, has announced the release of a CDN solution that’s going to be available to their customers at the price point of $20 per month.CDN or [...]
December 30th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Sorry for my ignorance, but it is a hosting, or is a service for hire in parallel with my hosting?
December 30th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Thanks for the question, Mindart. ProCDN is a complementary service to your hosting product. You can think of it more as an add-on or utility product that speeds up your existing website.
December 31st, 2010 at 2:08 am
John, thank you for the honest feedback. To be perfectly candid, we agree with your comments.
Our launch of ProCDN is a 1.0 release and we intend to improve the entire experience, especially the setup. We understand that you plan to wait to switch to our product, but we look forward to having you on the service soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in testing things as we develop future versions, let us know.
Sara
(mt) Product Team
January 1st, 2011 at 12:38 pm
While in Mexico, mt worked fine with all my clients, now I moved to Australia and you can clearly see the reduccion of speed when accesing the sites of my new clients here. My first option was to hire a hosting provider here but even with all the recent latency issues I’ve been faithful to you, because I know what to expect from your service.
This seems to be the right answer, but when you said the static content is what is copied worldwide, does that mean that all cms sites will still have to travel all the way, thus the improvement on speed will be hardly noticeable?
January 3rd, 2011 at 9:54 am
Polo – ProCDN should provide your sites with noticeable speed improvements because your content would be served from local servers. Our global, Edgecast-powered network serves your content from 19 locations on 4 continents.
January 3rd, 2011 at 8:57 pm
I am from Indonesia and have used mt hosting for quite some time,and after reading the comments of ProCDN i am wondering if it can resolve speedy latency that is quite cumbersome lately especially our site is powered by wordpress
January 4th, 2011 at 10:33 am
As Polo says, this sounds tempting but I’m not convinced that it would resolve all latency issues with a CMS-driven site if it’s only static media files that benefit from the CDN. I’m still with MT thanks to the excellent service and bang-for-buck but I’d love to hear that MT were opening a London data-centre or that CDN really offers the same speed improvements…
January 4th, 2011 at 11:00 am
John, thanks for the comment! I can see your perspective also.
The rationale behind (mt) ProCDN 1.0 was to get rock-solid, core service features to end-users as soon as possible. We want to help people make their apps as fast as can be – as soon as can be. Then, in traditional fashion, we will iteratively enhance the user experience features. This is another reason why it was launched under our ProDev Series because, today, the setup absolutely requires webmaster involvement.
We have already experimented with other versions (for wider consumer reach) that completely automate the setup process. We are still figuring out the best approach for each of our user segments. For now, we know that most ProDev users will be able to set up their CDN with a bit of help from the (mt) Wiki. Future versions will decrease requisite web app, DNS, and Wiki knowledge!
In actuality, ProCDN is incredibly easy to get going. I don’t think (mt) has far to go. Thanks again for your comment!
Demian
January 4th, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Your documentation shows how to use the CDN to have it pull an entire site, or how to manually push specific files. I suspect this is the usage profile for, maybe 5% of your customers, if that.
Most of us have sites with specific static files like CSS, JS and HTML, but also have sites with images that may change, but are generally better served via a CDN. In our case, we have over 30 gigs of images and they change at a rate of one per minute on average.
Clearly, with files being added and deleted, a poll solution won’t work, nor will having to push manually. With S3 and Amazon’s cloud, there are protocols for pushing files, expiring them, deleting them, etc. Where is this functionality? I’d love to pay you guys to have our images on a CDN. Our site is for models and photographers to display their portfolios. JPG files, typically 20-50 per user, often in the 300K to 500K range. This is what CDNs were built for (among other things, of course).
Can you point me to the documentation so I can use this properly? I need to write code so that when a user uploads a new image, it’s pushed to the CDN. I need to write code so that when a user deletes an image, the CDN is notified that it can expire the image and delete it. I need to be able to keep the path to individual images in my database so I can properly create and serve the CDN URLs for each image. I need to know when an image is on the CDN so I can change that URL from a local one to the CDN one.
I’m totally keen to write this code (or, more accurately, adapt my Amazon S3 code and give you guys the business love, instead). Help me find the docs and/or API, please?
January 4th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I know Polo asked a similar question, but there wasn’t a clear, direct answer so I’m going to ask it, too. Almost all the sites we do are CMS sites. What portion of content is cached using this service? Your use of the term “static content” leads me to believe it’s just the images, graphics and static pages. What about accessing the database? If users still have to wait for content to load from the database on the origin server, surely the load times will not be significantly affected with CMS sites unless the website uses a lot of video, audio, etc., which most sites don’t.
If there is a huge benefit to CMS/database-driven sites, then please give a full explanation why. Thanks!
January 4th, 2011 at 2:33 pm
When I purchased this today it didn’t say that it would be complicated to install. I’m on the phone with support now and the person hasn’t been “trained” so doesn’t know anything about how to implement it.
It would be great if you posted clear step-by-step directions on how to integrate this into a site.
January 4th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
The same question as firman: does ProCDN really increase our client’s website delivery speed if they use not a static solution for their web presence (like HTML files) and instead are using a CMS (like WP)?
Can you post print screens with the control panel of using ProCDN?
January 5th, 2011 at 6:28 am
I am from Canada and a developer/designer. Any particular reason there are NO Edgecast network servers in either Canada or Mexico, both country part of North America???
January 5th, 2011 at 9:07 am
Congratulations on such a move. As an agency, we work with a number of CDN providers, including the biggest, but i’ll be looking forward to enabling ProCDN would it be only to *have a good style* on smaller websites. I’m a bit wary of John’s comments, but on another hand, good CDN management does come with a level of complexity anyway, far beyond the control panels (which i agree must be improved for all providers). Sara, 2 questions : you mentionned testing new developments – i’d be happy to know more about that. Other question, are you planning into developing more pops in Europe+EasternEurope ? and what about plans for Mainland China ? Best regards, david @ http://www.kbsd.com
January 5th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I have one site in mediatemple and other in hostgator, its possible to use the MT/CDN in my hostgator site??
January 5th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
@Georgia — Here are some set-up instructions for ProCDN: http://wiki.mediatemple.net/w/ProCDN:Get_started
We’re sorry about your experience with our Support Staff. We have reviewed this issue and have made sure that our phone support team is properly trained to assist you. Please let us know if you have questions.
January 5th, 2011 at 7:42 pm
ProCDN sounds cool.
(mt) should ask Patrick to add their servers to the webpagetest.org code
just a simple forum thread will do like this one
http://www.webpagetest.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=462
January 6th, 2011 at 2:37 am
I just added the service to my gridservice – can’t wait for the results. I’m not sure if it’s set up properly simply because I’m not sure what the “host server” is?
January 6th, 2011 at 9:52 am
I understand the confusion and questions surrounding CDN and want to clarify the benefits of using ProCDN for a CMS site (e.g. WordPress).
QUESTION: Given a CMS style website where content is dynamic, what benefit does ProCDN Provide?
A CMS can greatly benefit from the use of a CDN when there is a decent amount of traffic to the website. Here are two example setups which use ProCDN to be more speedy and responsive:
1) WordPress Website: Offloading CSS/Images/JavaScript
In this example we can have all static files served from the CDN. Let’s say that your page has 10 images, 2 CSS files and 3 JavaScript files. When hosting it yourself without the CDN you have a single request that hits the main page.
This page then gives the links for the 10 images, 2 CSS files and 3 JavaScript files. Each file is downloaded and rendered in the browser. Your web server gets a total of 15 HTTP requests and utilizes 30 file handles (2 per request). Additionally, due to browser configurations some of these are downloaded in parallel, while some are waiting for the others to download (typically 2 files per domain can be downloaded at the same time). You may have multiple instances of waiting for files to complete.
In the case where this is hosted with ProCDN and the static files are offloaded, it becomes a single request to the HTTP server, utilizing 2 file descriptors. In this situation, the server would be able to handle on the order of 10 times the amount of traffic with using the same resources from an HTTP Request / File Descriptor point of view. This is NOT true from a memory/cpu standpoint (due to dynamic page generation by nature being more excessive in both respects than static file serving).
Further information can be gathered from sites like http://symkat.com/105/cookieless-domains/ as to how WordPress can be configured to do this. In this article there is talk about configuring WordPress with a plugin that allows the rewriting of the HTTP urls and achieves this offloading with very little configuration on WordPress.
2) WordPress Website: CDN Buffered
ProCDN aims to be RFC 2616 compliant, and is with regard to RFC 2616 Section 14. Using the techniques for expiring that are documented in http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
You can utilize ProCDN in front of your entire site. By using a max-age (or s-maxage) header you can set how often to refresh the cache. Suppose that you add “cache-control: max-age: 600″ into the response headers. This will allow the website to be served from ProCDN completely, and be refreshed every 10 minutes. Very rarely does a website *truly* need up-to-the-second responses. If 5 minutes or 10 minutes is low enough for a lag between blog posts being posted and comments being refreshed, this is a very useful solution.
This solution would work well with Blogs. However, it is NOT recommended for active wikis or forums.
———-
I know the information above is quite technical. Please keep in mind that this product is aimed toward our ProDev customers and requires webmaster involvement and technical proficiency with DNS, HTTP web servers, and caching concepts. We will be working to simplify the set-up and configuration for all users but, for now, we have getting started guides in our Wiki for those that need help with getting started: http://wiki.mediatemple.net/w/ProCDN:Get_started
Thanks everyone for the comments.
Sara
January 6th, 2011 at 9:59 am
@Christopher Ambler — Thanks for the question.
Here is some information for a website that has content updating constantly, how you might control when things expire, or how you can make things refresh.
Expiring content can be handled with the HTTP headers as documented in RFC 2616 14.9.4 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.4)
This will allow entities to be reloaded from the origin at specified time delta. Additionally, you can manually purge a file by logging into your ProCDN Control Panel and clicking either HTTP Large or HTTP Small (depending on your platform) then clicking My Edge and entering the URL you would like to purge. A file purge generally takes 3-5 minutes to be processed.
It is important to note that files are not simply “scanned once and remain the same forever.” Cached files are automatically re-validated every 7 days by default. If your application or website supports adding cache control, you can customize how often the files are reloaded. For instance, WordPress has the WP Super Cache plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/)
RFC 2616 Section 14.9 documents Cache-Control fully, and should be referred to for technically-proficient customers. Further information about caching can be found on sites like: http://symkat.com/45/understanding-http-caching/
I hope this information is useful. Please feel free to contact our support team if you have more detailed questions.
Sara
January 6th, 2011 at 12:40 pm
Sara, that doesn’t come close to answering my question, I’m afraid. I don’t think you understand.
With tens of thousands of images in constant churn, there’s NO WAY that using a control panel is an option.
Ever.
And cache control is not the answer here, as these images are in flux and the URLs to them will be updated on the CMS automatically. If an image is removed, the URL will be removed as well. The CDN should be able to remove the file on demand and serve a 404 if it is later requested.
How would one use the CDN to programatically push, update and expire content in real time?
This offering appears to be fine for static content that changes infrequently, but there is pretty-much zero information on how to REALLY use it for things that Amazon S3 does now.
January 6th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
@Christopher — We’ll follow up with you directly to discuss options. We do understand your issue and want to help. Thanks!
January 10th, 2011 at 6:47 am
[...] MediaTemple.net launches ProCDN [...]
January 10th, 2011 at 11:47 am
My company is a local one in the US, http://www.myprintcompany.com. Would it be beneficial for me to get ProCDN?
Or would it only be beneficial to get it for worldwide traffic? If you do recommend it for the US only how much of a speed increase would there be can you tell me percentage wise?
January 12th, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Well, I did get a followup directly, which was an email that essentially said, “sorry, none of that is available. Bye.”
Wow.
February 14th, 2011 at 11:33 am
I have the same conundrum as Omar. My Business is based in the U.S. http://www.mikeputnamphoto.com/ and most of my web visitors are also from the U.S. Will upgrading my hosting to ProCDN make an appreciable improvement in speed and SEO for my purposes?
Thanks in Advance,
Mike
February 17th, 2011 at 10:13 am
@Omar Guzman
ProCDN will benefit sites where visitors are mainly from the United States. The reason for this is that our CDN has Points of Presence (POP) locations across the U.S. (Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Ashburn, and New York). With these U.S. locations your content would be served much faster for your visitors because they would be receiving content from POPs closest to their physical location. It’s not possible to provide an estimate on your expected speed increase because each site is different in terms of content and configuration. We recommend that you give it a try (we have a 30-day money back guarantee). Let us know if you have additional questions. Thanks!
February 17th, 2011 at 10:16 am
@Mike Putnam
Please see my response to Omar. Hope this information is useful to you. Let us know if you have further questions.
February 23rd, 2011 at 10:22 am
I have GS account and added grid container for my databases. Does it still apply to me if I add ProCDN to my account in order to speed it up?
February 28th, 2011 at 12:20 pm
@ Val
ProCDN definitely applies to you. The GridContainer gives you dedicated resources for databases, and ProCDN moves your static content closer to users.
March 11th, 2011 at 5:57 am
Can this service be used for external sites (not hosted at MT) as well as for say the grid service? I have accounts with multiple hosts and would want to use it with all of them. Thanks.
March 17th, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Hi, Since this service is only really good for the states, why advertise it as the best global hosting package?
Also, How does this service benefit Canada and lastly major traffic from Europe, Isreal and Australia?
March 18th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
@Victor, rather than host your website, ProCDN makes your site faster for viewers around the world. For example, if most of your target audience is in Germany, they will receive your website from a datacenter in Frankfurt instead of Los Angeles, making it load considerably faster.
March 19th, 2011 at 10:56 pm
My question was approved but not answered?
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:33 pm
@C, ProCDN can currently be used for any site, not just those hosted with (mt).
March 22nd, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Thanks Matt. You say currently does that mean there is a plan in the future (its something your thinking of) to limit it to sites only hosted with (mt)? Thanks.
April 2nd, 2011 at 11:04 pm
No reply yet?
April 8th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
What? I thought ProCDN is only available to (mt) customers.
May 15th, 2011 at 2:43 pm
[...] MediaTemple, which powers The 8BIT Network, has announced the release of a CDN solution that’s going to be available to their customers [...]