The Pitfalls Of Working With CDNs And How To Avoid Them

The information we’re about to give you isn’t something that a lot of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) out there want you to know. Hopefully, this article will help you make smart CDN choices and avoid being taken advantage of.

What Does CDN Do?

In the most basic sense, the CDN you’re using takes your company’s content and physically puts it closer to the user. According to research, your content should be delivered to your users within half a second. Anything that takes longer than that gets penalized by search engines and loses viewers due to “slow load”. So, if your CDN isn’t running as efficiently as possible, then you’re losing money.

Things To Watch Out For With CDNs

There are a few things to always look out for when signing on with a CDN, and one of them is that you should always read the fine print. One underhanded trick that some lawyers put into CDN contracts is auto-renewal. It’s not going to be blatantly in front of you, so read through the contract thoroughly. If you’re not happy with your service, and it auto-renews for a year before you can cancel it, the chances of you getting your money back are slim to none.

CDNs Can Drop You Like A Bad Habit

Working within the adult industry, you get used to dealing with people being a bit judgmental from time to time. Unfortunately, that also applies to companies working with you as well. CDNs have been known to send their clients packing once they were alerted to adult content being distributed. In some cases, such drops are argumented. If CDN locations include those where adult content is prohibited, it is very important to ensure that those pops aren’t active. If that is not possible – choose an adult industry-friendly CDN provider.

Draining Your Resources

We’ve had clients in the past who came with some real horror stories of bad CDN relationships. One of them was getting massively overcharged because their provider was making content get repetitively downloaded from their origin when it didn’t have to be. This increased costs for the company and didn’t distribute its content nearly as quickly as it should have. Their sigh of relief was palpable, once we came in and fixed the problem.

The origin server is the primary central location where your content is held. The efficacy of your content distribution relies heavily upon the CDN doing its job of relieving the origin server from incessantly serving the same content to the CDN.

CDNs And Overinflated Prices

The most commonly used CDNs are not always your best solution. Let’s take a major CDN provider like Amazon, and use them as an example. Amazon offers a great service but also charges exorbitant rates which escalate astronomically the more bandwidth is used. Many of their customers don’t think there’s a better option available.

MojoStorage object storage bandwidth is nearly 15 times cheaper than Amazon S3. When paired with MojoCDN, it’s 30 times less expensive than Amazon’s S3. More savings are available when you replace CloudFront’s convoluted, location-based rate for data transfer with MojoHost’s simple flat fee solution. That’s incredible savings, for an even better service.

The important thing is to thoroughly review what the CDN service offers, and never jump at the first solution you see. In the long run, you can save your company a lot of money with just a little more research. We’ll be here ready to provide a high-quality service, whenever you’re ready. Reach out for a CDN quote today.