CDN, WAF, Serverless Explained by MojoHost’s Technology Architect

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This video presentation from WMA Virtual conference held in June 2020 is awesome. Christopher gives a comprehensive overview of various subjects, explaining Content Delivery Networks, Web Application Firewalls, Serverless technology, and much more. Incredible insights on different use cases and applications for each of these services offered by MojoHost.

Video Transcript:

Today I’d love to talk to everybody about content delivery and the many and varied ways in which to do that.

Before I get started on that, though, I’d like to talk about MojoHost for a moment. I’m sure some of you are familiar with MojoHost already. For those who aren’t this familiar MojoHost is a web hosting company that is dedicated and focused on delivering a great product and a great service to the adult industry. We have been in business for more than 20 years now. Of course, there are a lot of hosting companies out there but as compared to others we understand the challenges and the unique legal way and scape of our industry. It is something we’ve been doing for as long as we’re around.

We understand not just how to set up your servers and manage them, but how to do so in a method that’s cost-effective for adult. This is one of the most cost-conscious industries in the entire Internet space. We also know how to ensure that all of the things you need from the correct jurisdiction to the correct setup, quickly take tons of content and all of it is done from end to end. 

And most of all, the fact that we love this industry means you will never going to have to worry that we will wake up someday and say, What?! There’s porn on our network?! Never. We know it, we love it, and it’s ours from beginning to end. 

Content Delivery Network or CDN

As for myself, I have a fairly wide background in a variety of different types of engineering. In MojoHost I’ve laid the efforts to build us a global CDN. So let’s talk about CDN for a moment. I’m sure many of you understand already the function and purpose of CDN. For those newcomers to the room, a CDN is nothing more than simply taking your content and putting it close to your users. 

Typically, when a customer wants to view a video or an image on your site, their computer has to go through a long and complicated dance. First, it turns your domain name into an actual IP address, then it has to navigate the potentially thousands of kilometers long row across the Internet from your user’s end location to your server, where the server has to look through an oftentimes extremely large content catalog in order to find the particular piece of content that the user has requested.

Once all of that’s done, only half the process is complete. Your server still has to send that data back across the Internet potentially taking a radically different path through many intermediate networks and carriers. Again, thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable, before finally reaching your end user. Even with everything tuned perfectly, this process can still take hundreds of milliseconds, even sometimes more than a second. We often say in the CDN side of the business that anything over 250 milliseconds is an eternity.

It’s true, there is a significant wealth of research that bears out the fact that the longer your website takes to respond, the worse the user experience is, and there is also quite a bit of evidence that suggests that faster website load time leads directly to better conversions. As well as particularly with paid sites and other premium content significantly helping retention. Want to put it another way, almost nothing drives users away from a paid product faster than being unable to use it or it being very slow when they try to use the product they’ve already paid for. 

So, how does CDN solve this problem? CDN as we implement it and as many implement it as I said means taking your content and putting it physically close to users around the world. In our case, between our own data centers as well in the data centers and networks of our partners. We have typically over 45 in some instances for very very fast content, over 70 different locations around the world where we can place your content. As an example, I’m sitting here giving this talk in lovely Tucson, Arizona. Although the nearest MojoHost data center to me is about 3,000 kilometers away, the nearest Mojo CDN data center to me is just 150 kilometers away, up in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Similarly, for almost every single person watching this stream right now there is a MojoCDN data center within a few hundred kilometers of them. What this means is that if I want to watch a video that’s hosted on MojoCDN or if I see an ad impression that’s generated by MojoCDN, my computer only has to send its data up to Phoenix. Similarly, because I’m sending my data over such a short distance, it often doesn’t need to change networks at all. It may in many cases make its entire journey over the same network from whom I buy my internet service right here at home. This fewer number of hops and lesser distance turns it directly into a superior user experience every single time. 

So, to make it happen of course we need to store many copies of your data pretty much everywhere in the world where your users may connect from. This causes problems for some CDNs. In the case of MojoCDN we’ve worked very hard with our various partner networks around the world to ensure that we can store a sufficient quantity of content in all of their data centers. So that your users are not constantly triggering a refresh of that content from your origin. 

Let me tell you a story. Several years ago we turned on an excellent VR website that has quickly risen to become one of the largest VR tube sites in the industry. They came to us from a very well-known household-name hosting provider from whom they were buying CDN and it was costing them a fortune. Of course, we offered them a great rate for their bandwidth. But still, even as the migration was going on, they were getting inundated with five and six-figure monthly bills. After some research we realized is that this other CDN only allowed storage for a few hundred gigabytes of content in each edge location. What this meant was almost every time a request came in, rather than being served directly from the edge location nearby to their users, that data, that edge location was reaching back out to the storage. Which had to find the file, generate it, and send it back down to the edge location, which would then send it to the user.

At that point the CDN was not helping them, it was actually hurting them. The fact that this CDN was essentially acting as a distributed denial of service against its own origin was causing them to have to spend considerable resources on the origin traffic. Plus this CDN was misconfigured in such a way that even if a user only watched the first minute of a video, the origin would send the entire video to that edge location which would then throw it away immediately. Each situation like this has led us to develop the MojoCDN to be capable of storing very very large content, libraries, distributed around our network. In addition, this customer and several others helped us to develop what we now call a CDN gateway. 

The CDN gateway lives on the MojoHost network and acts as an intermediary. Oftentimes CDN edge nodes can be a little bit stupid even if they have plenty of storage. Maybe somebody in their operations center accidentally deletes it or a policy is set incorrectly by a user so the content is being deleted from that CDN edge location faster than it should be. Rather than forcing each edge location to fetch the content from your server every time, which you have to pay for, we set the CDN gateway in between. It’s a massive data store that buffers copies of your content and when an edge location does need to refresh its local copy, it fetches it right from our CDN gateway. 

This is a service because we’re MojoHost rather than charging a lot we decided not to charge anything at all for it. We want our customers to have a great experience and so by providing this shield for their origin servers, we ensure that they do. 

So, CDN probably sounds pretty great. It allows users to typically access your content in under a hundred milliseconds. It spreads out your content all over the world. Of course, a side effect of that, the fact that every single request doesn’t have to come to your origin server means that in many cases you can use significantly fewer computer resources to power your origin server. Because it’s our distributed edge that bears the brunt of all this traffic rather than having to serve this data directly from your origin. 

So, in most use cases I strongly encourage people to use CDN and I invite you to talk to myself, Natalie, Brad, or anybody on the excellent MojoHost team. We’d be thrilled to help set you up and get you going even if you have only a modest-sized website, our benefits are significant. 

However, not every use case benefits from a traditional CDN. So, as I’m sure you can imagine from listening to what I’ve said, a traditional CDN works very very well when every user gets the same file. Because if every user gets the same file, like for instance, a streaming video, a clip, an image, it’s maybe in the header of a website, then it’s very efficient for us to send a copy of that file all around the world to each local location.  

But what about more specific content? What happens when every user doesn’t get the exact same file? Or when every user does get the exact same file but it’s alive for such a short amount of time that you never gonna want to use it again? Let me give an example of this.

Recently we’ve talked to several live and on-demand streaming sites who’ve expressed an interest in using various kinds of CDN. In an instance like this CDN is often not the right answer. Remember I said before that we have 45 or more locations around the world? If less than 45 users will ever view a particular file then it does not really make sense to send it out to all of these locations. On many streaming sites only the most popular streams actually have more than 45 viewers at the same time.

Indeed any time a model is having a private session or sending individualized content to a user there is only one individual user who will ever view that piece of content. So, as an example, on a streaming site with a stream that has perhaps ten or twenty active viewers you and us at the MojoHost network will be distributing that content out to 40-50 possible locations. But users will only actually be requesting the file from only a few of them. That’s highly inefficient. However, we have several solutions to that. First and foremost in a situation like that, we would set up what we call a sparse CDN. Sparse means that we target having just a few nodes, perhaps three, around the world close to major Internet exchanges and run directly on MojoHost’s network. 

As I’m sure Brad mentioned in his previous talk we have invested a significant amount of money in ensuring that our core network locations where we have our largest data centers have absolutely state-of-the-art intelligence platforms. They get examined several tens of thousands of times per day for all our outgoing routes and indeed the entire structure of the Internet in order to find the fastest route to each individual ISP around the world. 

For content that’s too unique to easily cache on CDN by hosting it in our data centers which are directly connected to some of the largest Internet exchanges in the world, you can ensure the best possible experience for this unique content. We also have some other exciting products like SendFaster which can help in certain circumstances, especially with live streaming and live video.

As one example of this, many of you may know that MojoHost’s flagship data center in the United States is located in Miami, Florida. People sometimes ask us, Hey, Miami, aren’t there hurricanes and stuff there? Well, yes, there are. So you say, Well, why do you have a data center there? Because every single fiber cable that runs to Central and South America lands in Miami, Florida. Indeed, in many cases if you are in one city in Brazil and you are trying to send streaming data to another city, in many cases that data will actually flow through our data center in Miami, Florida, on its way from one place to another. Similarly between almost any country in Central or South America or the Caribbean. As a result, we are perfectly positioned at the top of that network to have extremely low latency and high throughput for video streaming coming from models and studios in the region. We also have excellent deliverability for data headed back down to the region. 

We perform similar peering as it is called or direct connections to these major Internet exchange points all over the world. In regards to Miami when it comes to hurricanes: our data center in Miami is built into a giant windowless bunker that’s rated to withstand winds of hundreds of miles per hour, and indeed has for many years past. So, we’ve gone to all that extra effort because Miami is the place to be, to have the best deliverability to the rest of the Internet in the region. 

So, this all probably sounds great! You’re using your CDN and your users are super happy because your content is being delivered to them fast, the video streams from the beginning with no buffering or interruption, but how do you store all this data? Well, you could store it on a server, of course, and that’s okay until your hard drive dies.

Although we wouldn’t probably sell you a server with just a single hard drive, we’d probably sell you with several, but even still it can be expensive, and it can be hard to scale, once you’ve filled up a single server. Now you have to buy another one, your software will get exponentially more complex because it has to manage the data across multiple servers, figure out which piece of content is where and make sense of all of that. Or you can use our new object storage service. When I say new, it’s actually been out a year or more. But it’s absolutely flippin’ amazing. In fact, I’m just looking at my notes right now, what I actually wrote down was, Use our object storage boom shaka wah wah. 

Object Storage

So, I should probably elaborate on that a little bit. When it comes to hosting large libraries of content, object storage is the wave of the future. What exactly is object storage?

We run dozens of servers, each with dozens of hard drives, and whenever you submit a piece of content to our object storage service we slice it up into a bunch of little chunks. Then we make a bunch of extra copies of these chunks and we spread them over tens of hard drives throughout multiple different racks in our data center. What this means is you instantaneously get access to extremely high redundancy, meaning that we can lose many servers indeed, even several racks, entire racks full of servers, without having a chance of losing any of your data. But you also get access to infinite scalability with pay-as-you-go usage. This means is our minimum charge for object storage is just $1 a month. However, as you use it, you pay for just the storage that you are actually using. This means that if you have a huge influx of content, you don’t have to worry about provisioning for it. 

Similarly, if you have some old files sitting around that you don’t need anymore, as soon as they’re gone we will stop charging you for them. You don’t have the extra capacity sitting around that you have to manage the lifecycle for. Furthermore, because your object storage is part of our global solution with MojoHost, it’s always online. We have added over the last several years many many access gateways specifically to speed up the access of files within our object storage. So that whether it’s a tube site or a pay site opting to host large files on our network they are always available quickly out of our object storage either to feed their CDN or directly to their users as the use case may dictate. 

In addition, once you’ve started using the object storage, you’ll realize just how amazing it is to have a magical hard drive that never fills up. It’s the dream of every 14-year-old who’s discovering music, movies, comics, art, or whatever it is they are into on the Internet. I certainly remember in my case when I first started learning about programming I downloaded every resource I could until I filled up my entire hard drive and I had to painfully decide which things I could live without. But with MojoStorage you and your business never have to do that. If you wanna save something, you save it and it just works. 

So, whether you’re running a tube site, or a pay site or many other kinds of services object storage gives you both speed and reliability and of course, it works best with MojoCDN where we have direct connections between the product networks for an even faster experience. 

The other news that we have to announce is in cooperation with a very popular tube script Mechbunny. We have a direct integration with our object storage and our CDN. What this means is that you come to us, you buy one of our excellent Mechbunny plans and with just a couple clicks of a button, it is automatically configured to use our object storage and our CDN. This means for instance if you’re using Mechbunny then rather than potentially having to buy large, many hundred dollars per month servers, you can often get by with just one very small server. It will run for less than a hundred dollars a month, which runs just the administrative interface and renders the pages, and all of the heavy lifting of data storage and data transfer is handled automatically by object storage and our CDN. 

In addition, coming later this year, we’ll have a similar integration with ElevatedX. So, no more worrying about scaling servers, do you have enough hard drives or did one die. Everything is just automatically in the cloud. 

Now, thus far in my discussion, I’ve resisted mentioning particular competitors of ours. However, I’d like to particularly call one out. The most well-known object storage service- Amazon simple storage service, often just called S3. So, Amazon we’ve come for you with this. For our users, just by itself, Mojo object storage is almost 20 times cheaper than the Amazon AWS. When you pair it with MojoCDN, it’s 34 times cheaper than they’re offering. So, those offerings were excellent but simply cost-prohibitive for most people in our industry. We’ve listened and we understand and we’ve got that 20 times and 34 times price reduction to ensure that our industry still has access to these cutting-edge products. 

I just have a few minutes left in this thread, but having talked about these core products of our advanced division I want to move over to a couple of our newer products we’ve been working on. However, I was just reminded by Brad of one more important point which is that our object storage and CDN are 100% compatible with S3.

If you already have a solution that’s programmed to use Amazon services or one of their other competitors or if you find an off-the-shelf software that already supports Amazon, you do not need to make any programming changes. Just call out Mojo and say, Hey, I want you to save me money. We’ll have exactly one URL for you to change in your program and it just works on Mojo. So, that’s what we consider good Mojo when it comes to offering a product. It is not just building a great technical product but making it easy for the customers to use. 

So, as I said, I’d like to talk about two of our newer products, WAF and Serverless. As we’ve said before, all this CDN thing is pretty awesome but it really applies for static contact. Many of you, however, are rightfully concerned about DDoS attacks, scrapers, bots, and the variety of other attacks that are out there on your site all the time taking down your servers and generally causing problems.

Web Application Firewall or WAF and MojoShield

There are some services out there that can solve this problem. Cloudflare is a popular one, Incapsula is certainly an excellent one, although their price is such that well I don’t have enough kidneys to pay for it. So, we’re happy to introduce MojoShield which is a distributed security product. It runs on some of the same infrastructure as our CDN which means it is distributed around the world. What it does is act as not just a single bouncer for your virtual bar or club, but an entire flank of them spread all around the world and detecting bad traffic and bad activities before they get close to your origin servers. 

When you enable WAF, the IP address of your origin server is hidden and known only to us and we instead publish IP addresses of our data centers around the world. All of your users will connect through one of these where our advanced threat detection AI will scan through the request. It will look for simple things like, whether is it obviously broken in some way, and is it obviously malicious or hacked, however. It will also look for more complex things, for instance, because MojoShield is a product, we were able to aggregate threat information from our many customers. We were able to detect bad actors who perhaps are not directly malicious, but who are scraping multiple sites, we can often detect a scraper before they’ve actually scraped a significant amount of content on your site if they already have a history of doing this to other sites. 

MojoShield also has the advantage that as more users use it, the performance actually gets better because we have more data with which to work. In many cases, the MojoShield can actually improve the performance of your site as well because since it’s integrated directly with our CDN. The small files that you serve on your site like images, JavaScript, and CSS are being served out of a CDN node that is in the same edge data center as the MojoShield node so they can actually share the same connection and routing information, saving your users a few milliseconds in your page load time. 

MojoShield is a complex product and definitely requires integration from one of the MojoHost experts to help make sure that you don’t accidentally block malicious users. When used properly, it can significantly or completely reduce DDoS and other attacks.

As an example, particularly with things like installations of nets or affiliate management systems, the admin area of tube sites, and so on, these systems come under constant attack. We see on some of our customers thousands and tens of thousands of attacks per day against these critical portions of their infrastructure. By putting MojoShield in front of these you can ensure that only your legitimate users make it through.

Even if some malicious virus has compromised their computer, we can often detect this bad behavior by their own computer and show them a warning. The best part is that you can choose exactly the level of protection that you want. We can block everybody with a heavy hand, or we can take a lighter hand and if something suspicious happens, we can just slow them down by showing them a challenge, requiring them to prove that they are not a robot. Or even just let them through and raise alerts that something might be going on for further investigation on your part. And so, by doing this, you can protect your sites and also significantly take the extra load off of your servers. 

The last thing I wanna touch on is our new Serverless product. Now, I am well aware that Serverless is our new digital hipsterism. It’s a cool bandwagon on which everybody wants to jump, however, it’s also an excellent product when used properly.

Serverless is taking these concepts of CDN and WAF and taking the next step further. Rather than pushing your content out of all of these edge locations we actually push your code out of these edge locations. With Serverless we move beyond just being able to push static products out of the edge and actually allow you to write absolutely complete and complex code that is pushed out to all of your edge locations. All of the edge locations we are supported on, which is about 40 right now, and that code can run and respond to your users’ requests right there at the edge. 

How much can Serverless and WAF help you in terms of actual dollar savings? One of our customers, it is an ad network, was spending five figures a month with a major alternative provider. After some consultation with them and moving them to MojoShield and Mojo Serverless platforms their bill is about $600 a month now.

We’ve saved them over 90% on their bill for DDoS.  Part of the reason for this is we don’t charge when you’re under attack. The last thing you want when you’re under attack is to be charged extra to be protected from that attack. If you sign up to MojoShield and you come under attack with a distributed denial service attack the traffic during that DDoS is not charged extra, only the legitimate traffic that comes through we charge for. 

MojoServerless and WAF together are an excellent solution for real-time bidding. An excellent solution for pages that are customized per user, chat interactions, various kinds of conversion tracking, and anything where you have to do a computation for every user request and the result is not static. 

MojoStorage

I’d also like to preview one last new product coming later this year, which is MojoStorage.  Some of you have probably heard us discussing this a bit over the last year. We are thrilled to announce that we finally have a turbocharged kick-ass replacement for Amazon EC2 or Google Cloud servers arriving at MojoHost later this year. We’ve taken the learnings of the last several years and actually the learnings of the last decade and looked at what our users needed and what our users wanted.

When a user tells us that they’ve had a great experience with one of these cloud providers, we say, What was it about that product, what was it about that experience that you liked? And so we have devoted the engineering resources to develop a product that really fills that niche. In addition, you get great 24/7 MojoHost support and our absolutely industry-leading bandwidth rates coupled with this new cloud hosting product. 

Of course, it’s not for everyone. We also like to think of our more traditional offerings as a bare metal cloud. I realize for many years we have said “dedicated server”, but a bare metal cloud is just running your application right there on the bare metal but with our advanced card networking and other features. That would be arriving later this year, and for those of you who absolutely cannot live without VMs we encourage you to reach out to our speakers who would love to show you what good Mojo looks like when it’s applied to VMs.  

With that I would very much like to open up the discussion to questions. 

Q&A Section

Q: You were talking a lot about the cost-effectiveness of Mojo and that all sounds great especially if we compare it with Amazon web services, but I was going to ask you if you work with businesses outside the adult industry. In other words, can other businesses benefit from working with you? 

A:  We absolutely work with businesses outside the adult industry. And we love them. Adult has always been our first love but we work with any number of other industries including gaming. Of course, many businesses have similar technical requirements to adult. For instance like all of the many people who have been declined by YouTube and need a new place to find a new home, which if you sort of think about it is a lot the same as a tube site, they still need cheap hosting of big video files with reliable delivery and a lot of these things that we specialize in. We certainly work with dating, streaming, you know, pretty much anybody. If their content is legal, we are happy to work with it. 

Q: I know that it is quite important for many people involved in adult to stay anonymous sometimes and I was going to ask you if you perform any know your customer procedure. 

A: We strongly and strenuously protect the legal rights of our customers but we generally like to know who we are doing business with. We certainly encourage anybody who has concerns about that to reach out to Brad or myself or Natalie directly to discuss the legal protections we have in place for our customers.  

Q: I was also going to ask you a bit about your personal involvement. What was the biggest challenge that you faced within MojoHost? 

A:  Gosh, well, as always I think for an engineer the biggest challenge is sticking to just the things that we can do right now and not all the things that I’d love to work on. So, as somebody who sort of leads the innovation on our product side, I have hundreds of ideas for awesome products I would like to work on. But as somebody who’s also responsible for helping ensure that MojoHost is a stable company and really provides the products our customers use sometimes I just have to focus on the products the customers need right now.

As an instance of this, you know, several people have asked us over the years why we haven’t had a cloud offering earlier, given that Amazon and Google have had one for several years. The reason for that is we talked about it a lot and certainly it’s something that we would love to do sooner. At the same time we couldn’t – three years ago, five years ago we couldn’t do it while offering sort of MojoHost, good MojoHost guarantee in terms of service and while offering a real competitive advantage price-wise. Five years ago we could have done it, we would have been just as expensive as Amazon and at that point it’s a much harder proposition for us to switch, offer us to ask a user to switch. So we really try to make sure that when we launch a product not only is it technically excellent, but that it’s really affordable as well.   

Q: Do you offer a product comparable to Amazon Glacier for long-term storage?

A: I happen to know that you have my direct number and the answer is still sort of. Just call me about your use case and we can talk it over. So, the answer is sort of kind of and depending on the exact use case. 

Q: How does MojoHost make moving easy? Does someone have to pay both hosts while moving, that is white glove MojoHost move? 

A: One of the things we do that’s highly unusual in the hosting industry whether in adult or any other segment of hosting industry is typically we do not ask our customers to pay us while they are moving from another host. We understand that in many cases a move is a scary experience, you’re trusting us to migrate your site without  losing users, without losing traffic, without losing revenue for you. The last thing we wanna do is ask you to pay us while you’re still paying another host.

If you come chat with us, if you decide that Mojo is a great option, which you should because it is, then we’ll start billing you once we’ve completed the move. We certainly wouldn’t ask you to pay for a service that you can’t use yet because that’s not how we want to be treated, so that’s not how we wanna treat all of our customers. When we say white glove, we like to sort of come back to maybe the glory days of real travelers. Early air travel where you would be served your dinner with white gloves, you know, right in front of you in a very nice fashion.

That’s how we try to treat our moves, we try to ensure that the move is done smoothly with excellent communication with you so you know what’s going on, all the way throughout the move, and we also try to ensure that when our absolutely excellent technical team is doing your move they don’t leave you in the middle of it, they don’t say, Well, you gotta figure this out, or, You need to go talk to this other person. We are proactive, we run those things down, we ensure that we are there and ready to hold your precious data and your precious site carefully with white gloves, so to speak.  In the last two years, we’ve actually tripled the size of our customer support staff so that we can handle ever larger projects and more moves at the same time. So, we are ready and standing by to take on those projects. 

Q: Does MojoHost do contracts? What is the advantage of working with a web host that doesn’t require long-term commitments?  

A: No, we don’t do contracts. We don’t do contracts because contracts suck. There are really only two outcomes to a contract. One outcome is, that our services are exactly what the customer needs. In that case they run the contract all the way to the end so why did we waste all that time with the contract? The other option is that the customer is really genuinely unhappy. If that’s the case, the last thing we want to do is try to imprison them with the contract.

We say in the office, we say it every month when we have our all-hands meetings that we earn our customers’ business every day because we don’t have contracts. We cannot sit back and be comfortable that our customers are stuck with us. Our customers can leave whenever they want, we certainly hope that they don’t. History bears that they don’t because not having contracts means we have to win that business every day, every month, every week. It’s an important reminder for us about what matters but also it means we provide flexibility to our customers.

Even if a customer really loves us and stays with us not having a contract means that they can adjust their usage as their business grows and falls. We have had customers who have had massive explosion in growth and by not being locked into a long-term contract they can come to us whenever they need to adjust their usage. Similarly, we’ve had customers who whether for legal changes, shifts in their business, shifts in their personal life or whatever reasons have had a significant decline in their business. When that happened – and we always encourage our customers to come to us when there are major shifts in their usage – every time that happened we helped the customer reduce their spend and right-size their infrastructure for their business as it exists.

Again, at a competitor that has contracts that customers would be stuck, so the last thing we wanna do is ask our customers to pay for the services they cannot use or to try to lock them in or lock them down or something. That’s not the kind of good relationship we want to have. We wanna be there for our customers, flexible to move up and move down. I’m not gonna name any names here but I’m aware of at least two competitors in our industry who not only – not only do they lock their customers into contracts, those contracts are written in sneaky legal ways and they try to renew automatically. So even if the customer has been in a contract they wanna get out, they’re ready to leave, some of our competitors will try to sue their own customers for trying to leave while their contract is up because they say, Hey, now you know, your contract automatically renewed. Well, that’s not cool, that’s not good Mojo and that’s not how we do things.

By the way, if you do have a contract with a competitor, whether you wanna switch or not, now is a great time to review the language about auto-renewing and to tell them that you don’t want an auto–renew because the last thing you want – even if you like them anyway and wanna stay with them – the last thing you want is to be locked in without your knowledge. 

Q:  MojoHost has a premium CDN service and a value CDN. Why would someone choose one over the other?  

A:  There’s always a dichotomy between performance on the one hand and price on the other hand. And even as much as we absolutely try to, you know, always offer the best product for the price at MojoHost, the realities of the bandwidth world cannot be ignored entirely and so, the value CDN is still really really fast, in fact, our value CDN is demonstrably faster than many other providers’ sort of premium CDN. However, it is less expensive, it’s quite a bit less expensive than our premium CDN.

There are a few locations in the world where we cannot directly have a data center on our value CDN. The costs are just prohibitive. Let me give one example of that: on our premium CDN we have data centers in places like Manila, the Philippines, India, Africa, and just one example taken the one I gave, in the Philippines we still pay double digit dollars per megabyte per second for our bandwidth. That’s many many many times more than we pay for the bandwidth anywhere else in the world. So, when we onboard a customer, we really try to understand their use case. For most customers this makes no difference. 

If you’re just delivering a video stream, we can serve you just as well from a nearby location with much cheaper bandwidth costs and it will work just fine. But if you have a very specific requirement, perhaps you actually have a lot of customers in a particular country, or some other very specific requirement, then as necessary we can add those extra services to really tune the product for your exact use case. But the reality is, our value CDN is still extremely fast and works well for a lot of customers, and then for other customers where they really have premium content they want us to be in even more locations where we’ll upgrade them – not even upgrade, it’s not like first-class/second-class thing, it’s really about the use case thing.

Maybe, I’ll phrase it differently. If you just need to get from one city to another really fast, no matter what, then a Ferrari is the right answer for you. But if you need to send a lot of stuff, a Ferrari is not the right answer, you need a big, over-the-road truck. And so that’s really the difference between our different CDNs. It’s not about better or worse, it’s about the right solution to the right problem. If you just want to be fast at any cost and not send that much, then, you know, we have one solution for that. And if you need to send a lot of stuff, then we have another solution for that, we can tune between the two, suit the exact needs of our customers.

Just to give you an example, premium CDNs are often used for pay sites where the customers are actually paying for the videos and so the time for the stream, to start the show is the single most important metric, or for ad networks. Value CDN is often used for tube sites, download sites, and things like that. Depending on the configuration where the customer wants to be, the price difference can be as much as 50%.

But again, we always, when a customer comes to us, if we think that they’re gonna be better off on the value CDN, we will tend to put them that way. And if we think they’d be better off on the premium CDN, we’ll try to steer them that way. We always try to find just the right solution for each of our customers that fits both their budget as well as their technical demands. 

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