SimpleCDN – Some Limitations
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.
From the about page on the SimpleCDN website:
SimpleCDN’s network features across-the-board resiliency to ensure that your content is not exposed to a single point of failure. At the same time, our global network, large backbone, extensive peering relationships, and sophisticated distribution techniques, help steer your content around the Internet’s bottlenecks.
Looking just on pricing, they are a positioned at an excellent price point, being cheaper then Amazon S3 and Cloudfront combined.
SimpleCDN uses the same naming convention as Amazon S3 and refers to folders as ‘buckets’. When you upload or mirror files to the Simple CDN network they are stored in these buckets which are simply storage directories.
Some observations:
- There is currently no facility to delete or rename your buckets. Once a bucket is created you can not remove it from the system. Depending on the type of bucket it is, it may continue to consume space and the associated charges that go along with it.
- Each bucket can only point to one directory and one directory alone (called the origin folder). You can not link to downloads located within sub folders of the origin folder. You will need to explictley make a new bucket for every folder you wish to share.
For example, I have a download folder on my server located at www.nztechie.com/downloads. I created a CNAME subdomain record called cache.nztechie.com and pointed it to the SimpleCDN name server which in turn points to the downloads folder as the origin folder. The downloads folder contains a subfolder called ISO which contains ISO images.
I can not link to any files within the ISO directory without creating a new bucket which has an origin pointing to the ISO folder. If you have a complicated file structure, working with this can further complicate the matter.
[Update: Looks like there might have simply been a delay in mirroring my content. SimpleCDN is indexing subfolders now]
Some Positive comments
Despite the above niggles that I have had with the service, I should highlight some positive aspects I have experienced so far.
- SimpleCDN offers a free account with $15 worth of credit. This should be enough to allow users to evaluate the service before putting down any money. The service is a pre-paid service allowing you to top-up your account as required.
- Initial setup is quick and easy. SimpleCDN explains the different types of buckets really well. I was able to point a subdomain with a CNAME record to the SimpleCDN servers easily. DNS appeared to have propagated really fast as I was up and going within minutes!
SimpleCDN Expansion
SimpleCDN posted on it’s own blog in November that it will be adding message boards, community forums, a new and improved blog, new API, and improved documentation across the site.
I do hope this improves the interface so that buckets can be easily deleted and renamed.
You may also be interested in:
- SimpleCDN delivers on pricing and new features In late December we reported on a new content delivery...
Tags: SimpleCDN
December 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Thanks for the great review, and taking the time to evaluate SimpleCDN.
I am glad you updated the post, as yes SimpleCDN will index all of your sub-folders, but if files are large, it may take some time for our servers to receive them, etc. This way you only need to create a single mirror bucket for your entire site.
Also the additional features you mentioned (rename, remove, delete buckets) as well as message boards, etc. will all be released on January 1st, as well as a new service where you will see even less-expensive transfer pricing!
Have a great day!
February 26th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I’ve tried using SimpleCDN. They are cheap and probably for a reason. I was going to use about 10-15Mbps, for tiny files, so it seemed like a cheap solution to my bandwidth problem.
- First problem, they didn’t let me use the whole $15, even though it was enough for me for more than a day. They locked my account in a few hours, without notice.
- My sites were down all night long. There is no phone number to reach support. I e-mailed them in the morning. They got back to me 5 hrs later. Asking for money and saying I would have used up my balance if they kept the site up. What is the point of giving $15, if they don’t let you use it?
- Even though I already had $13 of my credit for the evaluation period. I paid an extra $25, they opened my account.
- Then 5 hrs later, they shut down my account again, without notice. Citing terms of service. I e-mailed again. We’ll see when they get back.
Although price is really cheap, I don’t think I will ever use simplecdn again. I will try to get my $25 back. I still have $37 in my account.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I’ve been working on their CDN layer for quite sometime; testing everything before rolling out a large scale media platform, and man… 2 weeks before, with little notice, they completely change their entire business model.
I don’t blame them, pay-as-you-go is difficult for a reason, but in no way are they pay as you go anymore. They only have 2 options now, and both require up front costs (either to setup the service for you, or to pre-pay for storage space).
They had a lot of potential, but will definately be going for a more trusted name now. I have a hard time understand how $149/1gig of harddisk space is anyway realistic.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
nztechie, you’re probably going to see a lot of new posts as SimpleCDN has really botched its latest upgrade.
Not only did they suddenly change their business model (as onassar said in the post above) but they repeatedly mis-stated what the changes would be and keep changing the go-live dates.
They were supposed to introduce a major upgrade on March 15. That slipped to March 31, then April 1, then April 2, etc. It’s like a bad joke.
On my account page, I can’t create new buckets due to the upgrade. A message on my admin page said it would be re-enabled last week. It wasn’t. Two days ago, the note was changed (along with their business model), and it said bucket creation would return yesterday. Yesterday it was updated to say it would return today. Today it was updated to say it would return tomorrow…
They’ve lost my trust. I have to look for other options for my company’s CDN needs. Amazon is not as convenient — no auto buckets, can’t use FTP or SFTP to upload, no gzip support — but I know they’ll be around next year and won’t pull Mickey Mouse stunts like this.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:20 am
I am one of the people here to discuss their latest upgrade. They removed HTTP mirroring, and charge $150 to do rsync mirroring instead. They removed CNAME support, and charge $25 to do it through their support system. Other than that, absolutely nothing has changed on their system. They did partner with Highwinds to offer alternative distribution at a much higher cost, with mirrors located in the US and EU, but that’s not really an upgrade. So, really, the only thing they’ve done is raised the price by $175.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:57 am
A woman named Robyn from Simple CDN sent slanderous statements about me in an email:
1)Stating that I owed them money — not true.
2)Stating that we were not testing but trying to use phoney credit cards and get free service — not true
3)Suggested that they had reported me to law enforcement — not true
We were testing Simple CDN in good faith, and found major problems. We didn’t even publish them — there is so many horror stories about SimpleCDN. There was no reason to slander me — since I was sending them a customer. For them to make wild and false statements to a person I was sending to them means that SimpleCDN will attack reviewers and consumers as a way of silencing them.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
You might wanna recheck your definition of slander. The only horror story I could find was from some guy spewing the same stuff all over the place, after getting busted using their service for piracy and/or fraud. After getting asked to show their site to back up their claims, they vanish into the ether, to never be seen again. While they might do things in a retarded fashion, they are extremely reliable, and extremely cheap, two qualities which are usually mutually exclusive. Not even the great and powerful Amazon can compete with them in reliability. Granted, the lack of access controls kinda sucks, but that’s not something I need yet.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I tested them using the $15 credit/free trial and system works well. The streaming capability is something Amazon CloudFront does not offer. They also have anew service “Lightning” that is for simple files/images and priced at a point that using it for general website assets is affordable.
Now the bad – I have submitted a simple request about Hurricane service pricing – their pricing page states “Varies – Contact us”. Well 4 days later and still no reply. By any standards that is poor. Given I am considering the service it is a major negative as I am thinking their tech support is probably even slower.
July 5th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
SimpleCDN is a nightmare; I’ve been with them for several month now. They sometimes take our content offline without prior notice, and once they erased our several GB of content without our authorization. It cost our business £1000′s and we received a load of customer complaints as a result. But SimpleCDN’s response to our emails were “You requested the delete of your content.” We asked them to show us the request, and their response was “We do not keep emails, but our engineers would not have erased anything without your request.” … incredibly bad support, rude, slow, and unreliable service. When we sent in a complaint about the treatment we’d received, they ignored our email and erased our account. We had to set up a new one and it took us 2 weeks to re-upload all our data. We are a very loyal customer of SimpleCDN, and we keep our account topped up at the $150 mark level all the time, using up a max of around $400 a month in bandwidth – so we bring them some good custom. We are looking to find an alternative backup service to SimpleCDN. If like us, you were tempted by their simplicity and cheap prices, just be careful – from our experience they tend to treat customers wrecklessly. We just can’t risk it, as our business depends on the CDN being up and running at all times.
July 31st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
One word…Voxel.net. Sure, they have a $100 monthly minimum but it worth it to not have the headaches. I’ve seen SimpleCDN change their business model 3 or 4 times. First, they had the pay-a-flat-fee-for-life rates. Next, really low pay-as-you-go with no setup fee. Next, was the intro of the Hurricane service. After that it was the intro of the setup fee. Now I hear there is no setup fee. I waited a week for them finish their upgrade so they could setup my account by the time I got to week two we were already using Voxel. How many companies wouldn’t plan better before making an upgrade.
August 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Cheap as chips but absolutely useless at communicating.
We begged them for info regarding an RTP service. They said a couple of days.
Well ,the days passed and nothing happened.
Again we asked for more info, no replies at all. We lost or customer.
Pity they did not have balls to say they were in trouble .