In late December we reported on a new content delivery system by company SimpleCDN, promising to provide capabilities comparable to competitors such as Amazon and Akamai for a fraction of the cost.

My analysis of the service in December was positive overall.  I can now report that SimpleCDN has further expanded it’s offering with new services and a pricing initiative sure to demand attention.  Since December, SimpleCDN has introduced a series of new services and a pricing structure for it’s just-released StormFront delivery offering.

The new features

Users of SimpleCDN are now able to password protect content carried on the network.   By using this facility you can restrict access to bucket contents and limit content to downloaders you choose to provide password credentials to.

Content within buckets can be automatically refreshed on demand.  The synchronisation between buckets and your origin server is an automated process, but it can now be sped up by using this option.  This option is only applicable to Auto and Mirror buckets.

SimpleCDN now includes a facility to delete your buckets from the system.  Before the introduction of this facility you would need to contact support to have this task performed.

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As you may be aware, content distribution networks have been around for quite some  time now, giving businesses the ability to cache web content in order to provide for increased traffic and so that content can be brought closer to the end user, speeding up the download in the process.

The most well known big players in the market are companies such as Akamai and Limelight networks.  The caching packages these companies offer are typically only within the realms of enterprise customers.

Some new competitors have emerged recently, including Amazon who are selling a service and storage platform called Amazon S3.  You can use this network for content storage and it can be upgraded with a new service called Amazon Cloudfront to provide a full content distribution network.

Content Distribution Networks

The idea behind this technology is to provide web surfers with the best experience possible by giving them the fastest and most reliable connection to your web content.

By storing your website content on a multitude of servers around the world you can automatically serve each user from the closest and fastest server, and provide automatic fail-over should one server be unavailable.

You should also note that by spreading your content among a number of servers you are also dividing traffic demands between them.  You can also use this to reduce stress on your existing serving infrastructure.

Some enterprise companies such as Google have implemented their own edge caching network to improve delivery of content to  customers.

SimpleCDN

I have been looking  at the  SimpleCDN content distribution network for web storage and content caching.  They appear to be the new boys on the block and do have some rough edges which do need to be sorted.

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Comment spam is the bane of every blogger, with Spambots taking up time, bandwidth and human resources, all while adversely affecting website statistics. This article talks about how you can manage this never ending deludge.

I run three other blogs under the nztechie.com domain, in addition to the main homepage of nztechie.com. My other blogs are hosted using Googles Blogger service. To this day I have had never had any cause to complain about the service. I guess I have been fortunate enough to not be plagued by some of the major issues you may have heard about in the press.

Running a blog, you would expect to be exposed to a certain level of spam comments in the articles you write. I certainly have had my share of such comments submitted to my blogs. Fortunately, I have blogger set to require approval on all comments made. Spam comments never see the light of day on my blogger blogs.

NZTechie.com used to run on a Joomla content management system. While it is quite an advanced system, I found it didn’t really meet my needs, and switched to WordPress.

I have never seen so many spam comments submitted on any site which I have administrated since installing WordPress. Again, I have to approve any submitted comments, so spam never reaches my site.

WordPress comes with the Akismet spam plug-in/service which so far has performed fantastically well, catching all spam comments with no false positives. My implementation is of course in its infancy, so time will tell how effective it is. Akismet is described as an intelligent anti-spam solution which actually improves as time goes on.

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