Traffic Management and CDN's @Plusnet
Hi all,
The traffic management platform <a href="http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,91720.0.html">problems experienced today</a> have raise a very important issue other than the inexcusable fact Plusnet's network infrastructure hosting the failed hard disk containing the database seemingly had no inbuilt redundancy and that is the classification of website content hosted on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network">Content Delivery Networks or Content Distribution Networks</a> or as they otherwise known as CDN's.
Currently all <a href="http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/download_servers.shtml">content/data/files hosted on CDN's</a> is treated the same way regardless of the type of site it belongs too and this is where the problem lies.
I think it’s fair to say the average user would expect traffic from download sites such as <a href="http://rapidshare.com/">RapidShare</a> and <a href="http://www.megaupload.com/">MegaUpload</a> to be managed more aggressively much the same as they would expect traffic file sharing or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer">Peer-to-Peer</a> site such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29">BitTorrent</a> downloads which can attribute to a massive amount of data and swamp networks. However they do not expect or want data from a seemingly ‘normal’ sites such the BBC, Amazon or eBay to be classified in the same was as file sharing or P2P.
Additionally we must allow for the fact that some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network#Commercial_CDNs_using_P2P_for_delivery">CDN's utilise P2P</a> to improve the performance and efficiency of their network infrastructure and distribution. Not only that but the usage and the type of content hosted on CDN's is also changing. Originally CDN's were once only the domain of larger more wealthy site owners and used to host large files for download or multimedia such as video for streaming. Now as costs come down and CDN's also become more accessible to smaller site owners they are hosting much smaller files such as CSS, JavaScript and images in order to speed up their websites, improve user experience and as part of their overall SEO strategy.
Currently as it stands and If I have understood this all correctly Plusnet customers are being penalised unfairly by being classed in the same category as heavy users of the network.
I think it is only fair that content/data/traffic from CDN's should be graded and profiled accordingly e.g. a. the type of website it originates from b. the data type c. the overall size of the data/file e.t.c.
I hope this all makes sense, It's been a long day staring at this screen. I just thought It was an important subject that deserved some discussion.
DM.
The traffic management platform <a href="http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,91720.0.html">problems experienced today</a> have raise a very important issue other than the inexcusable fact Plusnet's network infrastructure hosting the failed hard disk containing the database seemingly had no inbuilt redundancy and that is the classification of website content hosted on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network">Content Delivery Networks or Content Distribution Networks</a> or as they otherwise known as CDN's.
Currently all <a href="http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/download_servers.shtml">content/data/files hosted on CDN's</a> is treated the same way regardless of the type of site it belongs too and this is where the problem lies.
I think it’s fair to say the average user would expect traffic from download sites such as <a href="http://rapidshare.com/">RapidShare</a> and <a href="http://www.megaupload.com/">MegaUpload</a> to be managed more aggressively much the same as they would expect traffic file sharing or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer">Peer-to-Peer</a> site such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29">BitTorrent</a> downloads which can attribute to a massive amount of data and swamp networks. However they do not expect or want data from a seemingly ‘normal’ sites such the BBC, Amazon or eBay to be classified in the same was as file sharing or P2P.
Additionally we must allow for the fact that some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network#Commercial_CDNs_using_P2P_for_delivery">CDN's utilise P2P</a> to improve the performance and efficiency of their network infrastructure and distribution. Not only that but the usage and the type of content hosted on CDN's is also changing. Originally CDN's were once only the domain of larger more wealthy site owners and used to host large files for download or multimedia such as video for streaming. Now as costs come down and CDN's also become more accessible to smaller site owners they are hosting much smaller files such as CSS, JavaScript and images in order to speed up their websites, improve user experience and as part of their overall SEO strategy.
Currently as it stands and If I have understood this all correctly Plusnet customers are being penalised unfairly by being classed in the same category as heavy users of the network.
I think it is only fair that content/data/traffic from CDN's should be graded and profiled accordingly e.g. a. the type of website it originates from b. the data type c. the overall size of the data/file e.t.c.
I hope this all makes sense, It's been a long day staring at this screen. I just thought It was an important subject that deserved some discussion.
DM.
eh? Special types of what? 
