Every few weeks, I’ll run trace routes on a particular group of websites, to find out what CDNs are being used. I ran trace routes on the Alexa sites that are ranked #25 through #61, and based in the US.
Most POPs that CDNs build out tend to be dummy POP’s. The infrastructure components at the POPs consist of servers loaded with caching software, routers, switches, load balancers (software or hardware), DNS servers, gateways for TCP/IP optimization, logging servers, admin
Level 3, a leading Content Delivery Network, has lost three CDN Product Managers over the last few years. First, Ted Middleton left to join EdgeCast as VP of Product Management. Next, Michael Fay left to become VP of Product &
Akamai is a BtoC CDN that has 140,000 servers and thousands of POPs in its ecosystem, delivering 30% of the Internet traffic. The Akamai ecosystem collects an incredible amount of log data, globally, on a scale that most likely surpasses
In my previous post, I noted that Akamai needs to create $1B in additional annual revenue by 2020, in order to reach its $5B in sales/year milestone, set by Paul Sagan (ex-CEO) in 2012. And that’s after taking into account
Finding the next billion dollar idea in the CDN industry is proving difficult. So far, no one has done it yet. Akamai, Limelight & EdgeCast, are the only three CDNs with the financial resources, R&D, and technical know-how, to be
Below are some interesting numbers. I decided to calculate the annual revenue per customer, and compare them across 4 different CDNs. The numbers are guesstimates at best, with the exception of Limelight. Limelight provides the actual number of customers in
Finding the CDN of any website is possible with a trace route. In most cases, the trace route can identify the CDN being used. It’s not 100% accurate but it’s good enough. Below are the trace routes for the Fortune
Internap, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, acquired hosting company iweb on October 2013 for $145M. iweb, which caters to the SMB segment, generated $44M in sales and $11M in EBITA over a 12 month period. Back in 2012, Internap acquired Voxel, an
In my previous post, I noted that Akamai barely beat EdgeCast by 4. In this post, I’ll take the opposite position, as there are two sides to every tale. Akamai delivered twice as many websites as EdgeCast. However, doing a
The 2014 CDN Report Card is available now. Click here to read. 1st Place – Akamai 2nd Place – EdgeCast 3rd Place – Limelight Networks 4th Place – Check out the report
The CDN industry has several business models in play. I personally see four prevailing business models. Each one is different from an operations, sales, engineering, and ordering standpoint. Here is a snapshot of the four business models: Amazon CloudFront &
I am sure Akamai is regretting their decision not to buy EdgeCast. If not, they will after this post. There are probably a few dozen CDN executives that haven’t considered the repercussions of the Verizon acquisition. I have, and the
Fastly, the cool startup from the Valley, has decided to throw in the towel and get into the streaming business. This is a big move for a CDN to take, especially one coming from delivering small files such as images,
Akamai’s acquisition of Prolexic was genius. Prolexic is one of the leading cloud-based security companies offering DDOS protection. Their infrastructure consist of the following: global POPs, Tier 1 connectivity with multiple carriers, massive hardware deployment, custom applications for monitoring, alerting
