What are your options when it comes to rolling out your own CDN?

Build

You could build your own, in multiple flavors. Buy specialized hardware with proprietary code and just run it on your network or you could build one from scratch. Regardless of your choice, there will always be a trade-off between your time to market and how much control you will have over the resulting product, between how much it costs and how much of a differentiator it offers.

Buy or Partner

You could partner with or buy an existing CDN and then all you would have to do is handle the marketing on your end and start selling it. Unfortunately these options will leave you with decreased margins, your priorities never being met, and if the existing CDN is acquired you will be left out to dry.

CrowdCache

The CrowdDirector and CrowdCache tag team offers you a quick path towards rolling out your own content delivery network with reduced risk, yet great room for building a creative and revenue generating product to offer to your customers.  In addition it will leverage your existing bandwidth and computing capacity, which you may already own.  It’s a technology that will allow you to monetize your idle capacity.

The simple four-step process below illustrates just how simple it is to get your CDN service, which could be sold as a product, rolling in literally minutes!

Deploy the CrowdCache binary on the servers available in your different hosting facilities and start them.

Deployment is done through simple copy of the binary on each server and can easily be batch processed.  Startup is executed through a simple shell command, binding the CrowdCache instance to the CrowdDirector backend through a unique startup key passed as a command line argument.

Organize your CrowdCache into logical groups named “pools” using the CrowdDirector CrowdCache management web interface.

Pools allow you to build subsets of CrowdCaches serving as different QoS or Geographical caching maps to sell to your customers.  At this point, your “turnkey CDN” is literally ready for production. You can now start provisioning customers.

For each new CDN customer, you will simply repeat steps 3 and 4 below.

 

Use CrowdDirector’s CrowdCache Management web interface to configure a mapping to your customer’s centralized web origin.

Bear in mind that you can map towards a Web Origin that is either located in your own hosting facilities (i.e. on one of your web servers), or to a Web Origin that doesn’t belong to your hosting infrastructure.

Create a “ruleset” in the CrowdDirector Rule Management web interface and assign it to any of your custom CrowdCache pools. To start delivering content, point your customer’s DNS record to the ruleset hostname.

You can match your pools to the level of service and/or caching geography mapping that your customer has been subscribing to, therefore matching his own unique delivery scheme.

Congratulations! You just CDN-enabled your customer in a few minutes time.