GoGrid CDN
From GoGrid
| GoGrid CDN | |
| |
| OS | Any |
| Added On | Nov 3, 2009 |
GoGrid CDN allows you to accelerate the delivery of all your web content using our global infrastructure.
Contents |
Overview
GoGrid CDN (Content Delivery Network)is an extensive global content delivery platform which instantly scales your web presence and allows you to accelerate the delivery of all your web content using our global infrastructure. Your end users will receive their desired content from the fastest point-of-presence (PoP) on our network no matter where in the world they are located. This ensures faster page load times, more reliable and efficient transactions from your web pages, better streaming video and more time spent by visitors to your website. GoGrid CDN supports Adobe Flash, Windows Media and Microsoft Silverlight steaming services.
GoGrid CDN Account Activation
GoGrid Customers
- Go to the GoGrid Customer Portal.
- Click the "Support" tab in the upper right-hand corner.
- Click "Add a case".
- From the "Category" drop-down menu, select "GoGrid CDN".
- From the "Sub Category" drop-down menu, select "Provision".
- Click "Save". You will then receive a confirmation and tracking email from the GoGrid Helpdesk.
- Once your CDN account is provisioned, you will receive a welcome letter with instructions on how to access the GoGrid CDN Media Control Center (MCC).
- A direct link to the MCC is located in the GoGrid Portal in the "Network" widget.
- Alternatively, you can go directly to the MCC at https://cdn.gogrid.com.
- GoGrid CDN Login and Passwords are recorded as a comment on this case. To view this comment and get your login credentials:
- Go to the GoGrid Customer Portal.
- Click "Support".
- Click "View Cases" .
- The comment is located on your "Provision" case with the subject: "GoGrid - GoGrid CDN>Provision". If you do not see that case, click on "View Closed Cases".
- A direct link to the MCC is located in the GoGrid Portal in the "Network" widget.
- Setup documentation is located in the "Help Documents" section of the MCC Home Tab. The detailed documentation provides setup instructions for HTTP large file, HTTP small object, and Flash Media (FMS)/Windows Media (WMS) streaming for both: Live and On-Demand (VOD).
ServePath and ColoServe Customers
- To activate your GoGrid CDN account you must first sign up for a GoGrid account. (Note that ServePath and ColoServe customers are not required to deploy any GoGrid servers in order to use GoGrid CDN)
- Follow the GoGrid customer activation steps above.
Pricing
Transfer
(Includes delivery across North American, European, Asian and Australian PoPs)
$0.25/GB -- HTTP large file
- includes progressive and software downloads, live and on demand FMS and WMS streaming
$0.30/GB -- HTTP small object
- includes website acceleration, ad delivery, images, CSS, Java Script, and HTML
Storage
$0.60/GB of storage
- inbound/outbound transfer included
- API requests included (PUTS, GETS, LIST, and COPY)
Advanced Features
- Token Authentication Module ($149.99 Setup, $149.99/month)
- SSL – Standard ($299.99 Setup, $299.99/month)
- SSL – Custom Certifications ($599.99 Setup, $599.99/month)
- RSYNC/ SFTP Services (replication) ($299.99 Setup, $299.99/month)
- Advanced Reports and Analytics ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
- Real-Time Reporting ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
- Edge Performance Analytics Module ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
Billing
Accounts are invoiced monthly based on the transfer and storage used in the prior month.
Support
Support cases must be created through the GoGrid Customer Portal.
The support link located in the GoGrid CDN Media Control Center will redirect you to the GoGrid Customer Portal. After logging in:
- Click the "Support" tab in the upper right-hand corner.
- Click "Add a case".
- From the "Category" drop-down menu, select "GoGrid CDN".
- From the "Sub Category" drop-down menu, select "Support".
- Click "Save". You will then receive a confirmation and tracking email from the GoGrid Helpdesk.
Storage
GoGrid CDN offers you high capacity, high-availability storage for all of your content at $0.60/GB. Our high-performance storage infrastructure is accessible via FTP, RSYNC, SFTP*, and web interface, and is designed to be redundant and scalable. You can easily upload your content directly to our storage PoPs, where the content is picked up and brought to the edge by the caching servers. Optionally, you can add a Customer Origin location for content stored on your own servers.
* RSYNC / SFTP Services (replication) ($299.99 Setup, $299.99/month)
Customer Origin Storage
Customers that store the content on their servers benefit from not having to upload new content to the GoGrid CDN Storage Backbone. You will also benefit from added flexibility when using authentication that allows you to protect certain content from being displayed. However, the downside of using customer origin is that if your connectivity or storage is ever unavailable/down, GoGrid CDN servers will not be able to reach the content. If the customer origin is performing slowly, high levels of latency in the delivery of the content may result. GoGrid CDN SLAs ensure that the GoGrid CDN Storage Network will always be up and highly available globally.
Global Network
Footprint (18 PoPs)
GoGrid CDN has strategic global locations to store and serve your content. We maintain content caching points of presence (PoPs) in San Jose, Los Angeles (2 locations), Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, New York, London (2 locations), Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. All PoPs are located in tier one data centers strategically located near primary Internet Exchange Points, placing our GoGrid CDN servers at the center of global network peering and traffic exchange, and putting your end users just milliseconds away from your content.
Global Load-Balancing Platform
Our routing protocol and global load balancing technology serves content requests from the fastest PoP to the end user. Traditional content delivery platforms use DNS routing methods that require multiple levels of DNS triangulation before the content can be served. GoGrid CDN combines the robustness and instant response of one of the fastest DNS infrastructures in the world with proprietary routing protocols to ensure that client content is immediately delivered to the user directly from the GoGrid CDN PoP that is fastest for them, regardless of the user's global location.
Flash Media Server 3.5 (FMS3.5)
Adobe’s Flash Media Server is one of the most popular streaming technologies in use today and the GoGrid CDN supports their latest version, FMS3.5, which includes some of the following features:
1. Dynamic Streaming: Allows multiple files encoded at various bitrates to be streamed to the end user. In a congested network with fluctuating levels of available bandwidth, FMS 3.5 can switch between different streams (i.e., files encoded at different bitrates) and yield a higher quality, smoother, video viewing experience.
2. DVR functionality: Allows for pausing and seeking within live video.
3. Higher Performance: Delivers more streams and users per server. FMS 3.5 doubles the video streaming performance of previous versions.
4. Improved Security: FMS 3.5 protects your content like never before with enhanced stream protection as well as server-side security. Encrypted H.264 streaming is now supported via the encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE). Improved SWF verification includes support for validation from remote locations.
5. Enhanced Live Streaming Performance: FMS 3.5 has a smoother integration with the latest version of Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0. Flash Media Live Encoder allows users to send multi-bitrate live streams from a single encoder and enables the new dynamic streaming capability for live streams.
Content Security
Token Authentication*
GoGrid CDN’s token based authentication makes it simple and seamless to provide a high level of security that is layered on top of your mission-critical content. We provide the necessary security tools to enable you to restrict access to content by any combination of geo-location (for country blocking), by URL, time to live, or individual IP address, enabling for country-specific content, prevention of hot-linking to content, or ecommerce download/viewing of content for specific users. When a user visits and logs into your web application, the application generates and inserts a randomized encrypted token into the URLs of objects that are for display using the GoGrid CDN. Token authentication is now available for all content types, including HTTP, Windows Media and Flash Media Server 3.0.
*Token Authentication Module ($149.99 Setup, $149.99/month)
Secure Socket Layer (SSL)*
GoGrid CDN can provision and install custom SSL certificates for your account. GoGrid CDN provided custom certificates are in PCI Compliance.
*SSL – Standard ($299.99 Setup, $299.99/month)
*SSL – Custom Certifications ($599.99 Setup, $599.99/month)
Content Delivery
Large File Delivery
A large file is roughly any file over 1 Mbyte. Typical large file delivery applications include video and audio delivery or software downloads. Our large file platform is based on fast disk accesses, a massive throughput capability, and our patent-pending global load balancing solution, which seamlessly delivers large media to users throughout the world from all 18 of our Points of Presence (PoPs). This platform includes both live and on-demand delivery of Flash and Windows media and is a fast, reliable, and cost effective solution for all your progressive download and streaming needs.
Small File Delivery
A small file is generally any file under 1 Mbyte. Image, java script, CSS, and text files tend to fall into this category. Examples of small file delivery applications include ad serving, ecommerce sites, and photo sharing applications. This platform serves most cached content straight from RAM, which means minimal disk transactions, amazing first byte download times, and web pages that really pop. Just like our large file service, our small file platform hardware is located in all 18 of our worldwide PoPs and is backed by our rock-solid global load balancing algorithm.
Whole Site Delivery
Typically, sites contain a mixture of large and small objects. For example, the customer facing pages of a video site are an ideal application for our small file platform while the videos themselves are more appropriately delivered by our large file platform. With GoGrid CDN, this kind of versatility is no problem. When you work with GoGrid CDN, you have the power to choose and load your files on whichever platform (or combination of platforms) makes the most sense to deliver your whole site at the fastest speed possible.
Performance
GoGrid CDN's performance is constantly monitored by the leading independent performance monitoring tools such as Gomez, Keynote & Webmetrics. These tools provide us with the following metrics:
- Global performance monitoring from over 150 locations
- Network performance monitoring from over 70 backbones
- Network monitoring of stream quality
- End user monitoring of download quality
To test the speed of our CDN Network, go ahead and try downloading the files below:
http://test.cdn.gogrid.com/300Kfile
http://test.cdn.gogrid.com/1Mfile
http://test.cdn.gogrid.com/10Mfile
http://test.cdn.gogrid.com/50Mfile
Reporting
Core Reporting
GoGrid CDN's Core Reporting allows you create reports with customized date ranges, specified for either all or just individual PoPs for the following metrics:
- Traffic Summary
- Bandwidth
- Data Transferred
- Hits
- Cache Statuses
- Cache Hit Ratio
- CNAMES
- Storage
Advanced Reporting and Analytics*
GoGrid CDN’s Advanced Reporting is calculated every hour, ensuring our customers have access to timely performance data that allows you to analyze the critical metrics that relate to your content, traffic, viewership, storage, and more. The geography module displays a global map detailing your global user activity right down to the city. Reporting and analytics should enable you to lower costs, analyze trends, predict usage patterns, and help you improve the performance of your content delivery.
Advanced Reporting also includes granular reporting of streaming media (Adobe Flash and Windows Media) and HTTP download content into separate reporting sections. This reporting breaks down even further: root level, individual directory level, and individual file level. These reports are fully inclusive of bandwidth usage, global access locations, content types, browser/player types, and complete referral information. Reporting is available at various time intervals, from annual to hourly and even by custom date ranges, for enhanced flexibility and custom reporting intervals. GoGrid CDN has also made APIs available for key reports, enabling customers and partners to programmatically integrate our reporting feeds into their custom dashboards and applications.
*Advanced Reports and Analytics ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
Real-Time Reporting Dashboard*
This subset of our advanced reports brings true, up-to-the-second, live reporting to your desktop. Monitor your HTTP and Flash bandwidth utilization in real-time, watch connections being setup and taken down as they happen, monitor your storage usage and keep an eye on your purge and queues all from this easy-to-use dashboard.
*Real-Time Reporting ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
Edge Performance Analytics*
This suite of reports provides you with HTTP trending statistics and detailed insight into how the edge servers are performing. The information from these reports enables you to determine how to optimize your content and to determine what issues you should tackle to better leverage GoGrid CDN. You may also set up scheduled E-mail alert notifications either daily, weekly, or monthly for these reports. The benefit is not only improved performance, but also reduced GoGrid CDN cost structure.
Edge Performance Analytics reports are generated once per day for the previous day only and thus represent a sample of the day's statistics at the time of process, and do not necessarily contain the complete set of data for the day. The primary function of these reports is for determining performance and should not be used for billing purposes or exact numeric statistics. However, the Core Reports versions of the same reports (i.e., Cnames, Cache Statuses) do contain the full set of data since they update for up to seven days. Please refer to those reports for exact numbers. All reports are in UTC/GMT time. The data in these reports is available for 90 days.
Scheduled E-mails and Alerts
You may also set up scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly e-mail notifications for these reports. The e-mails will contain simple grids (no charts) in order to maximize readability for multiple e-mail clients. By receiving regular e-mails, you remain informed about the metrics of your website without having to log into the customer portal.
Alerts may also be scheduled for some of the reports. An example of an ideal use case would be to set an alert to be e-mailed when the percentage of 404 hits for the day is greater than 10%. These alerts will help customers catch problems quicker and therefore solve them sooner. Alerts are always run on a daily basis.
It is suggested you use e-mail distribution lists to simplify e-mail management. In the case where one or two distribution lists are used for all alerts, adding or deleting a user simply involves modifying the distribution list, rather than modifying all of the reports.
*Edge Performance Analytics ($99.99 Setup, $99.99/month)
Additional Features
CNAMES
You may elect to create a CNAME entry for all content that passes through GoGrid CDN, whether it originates on your origin servers or from within the GoGrid CDN storage solution. This allows you to alias the GoGrid CDN URL to another URL.
API
Access to reporting data and managing content are key benefits of this API and will help facilitate and automate the process of managing business workflow. All communications of the API use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and are further authenticated by username and password to ensure that the request originated from the right content owner. The GoGrid CDN Web Services is a .NET API that has been implemented using SOAP standardbased XML web services that are exposed via HTTP. The web services are compatible with both SOAP versions 1.1 and 1.2. C#, C, PHP, Java, Perl and other languages can be used to communicate with the services as long as they have basic SOAP functionality.
To learn more about SOAP, visit http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP.
Bandwidth Throttling
Our bandwidth throttling technology prevents you from paying for user-abandoned downloads and streams. In this age of short attention spans, quick site exits, and channel surfing, you shouldn't pay for the full download of a five minute video if the user only watches the first five seconds. Our technology is able to ensure a quality end user experience while mitigating the cost of abandoned downloads and streams.
Progressive Download
Our progressive download technology allows users random access to videos they are downloading (fast forwarding and rewinding throughout the file) before the files are fully downloaded without the licensing costs and technological burden associated with streaming.
Focus on Digital Media
GoGrid CDN specializes in content delivery services for digital media. Many legacy content delivery networks are not designed to support the delivery of extremely large streaming and downloadable media files; rather, they were tailored to support much smaller static files such as images, HTML, and banner ads. While the GoGrid CDN network excels in handling these smaller files, we have specifically optimized our network for streaming Adobe Flash and Windows Media and for large file delivery via progressive download. Our network is highly scalable to support massive and unexpected digital media audiences and flash crowds.
