OnApp CDN enables hosts to enter the $2.6bn CDN market without having global CDN infrastructure: federated CDN slashes costs for hosts and their customers

LONDON, UK - 08 August 2011: OnApp has announced the launch of OnApp CDN, a fully-featured Content Delivery Network for hosting providers. OnApp CDN provides instant global CDN capabilities for hosts, enabling them to build their own CDN without having to build their own global CDN infrastructure. This enables any hosting provider to enter the $2.6bn[1] CDN market, and paves the way for hosts to offer a new generation of low cost, high performance CDN services that even small businesses can afford.

A Content Delivery Network accelerates website performance by ensuring that visitors always get web content sent to them from a local server. Until now, building a CDN has required significant investment in datacenters around the world to provide that local capability. OnApp CDN enables hosts to use spare cloud capacity from other hosts to provide local CDN ‘points of presence’, with a marketplace that makes it easy to buy and sell CDN capacity on demand. This enables hosts to build a global CDN, monetize spare capacity, and launch low cost CDN services with features previously available only to very large enterprises.

At launch, OnApp CDN offers 40 CDN Points of Presence (PoPs) across America, Europe and Asia, placing it firmly in the top five global Content Delivery Networks worldwide. The OnApp CDN platform supports HTTP push, HTTP pull, and streaming/live streaming of online content.

OnApp’s CEO, Ditlev Bredahl, explained why today’s announcement is so significant for the CDN market, hosting providers, and anyone that depends on rapid delivery of online content: “The $2.6bn CDN market has been in the grip of a handful of vendors for many years. Prices are outrageous at the high end of the market, because providers have to recoup the cost of running a network of global datacenters. With OnApp CDN that’s no longer the case, which means hosts can bring CDN services to market at a much lower cost than other CDN vendors. At the low end of the market, functionality has been limited to basic website acceleration services. We’re making high-end CDN functionality affordable for hosts and their customers, for the first time.”

“There’s another reason OnApp CDN is significant for hosting customers,” he continued. “It means companies that depend on rapid delivery of web content can buy CDN services from the hosting companies they’re already doing business with - who understand their business, their current website set-up and can provide support as part of their existing relationship.”

OnApp CDN combines software and services from OnApp and Aflexi, which recently became part of the OnApp family. Whei Wong, who headed Aflexi, will head OnApp’s CDN product and OnApp operations in Asia-Pacific from offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Commenting on the launch, Whei said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for the hosting industry. There are perhaps 10 or 15 viable CDNs today. As hosts adopt OnApp CDN we expect that number to grow to several hundred in the next couple of years. With greater choice and significantly lower cost for CDN services, that’s great news for online retailers, publishers, and anyone that relies on high speed delivery of content.”
 
OnApp CDN has three principal components:

    OnApp CDN Stack: fully-featured CDN edge server software that is deployed by hosting providers, and managed through a user-friendly web interface. OnApp CDN replicates content from an originating website to local edge servers, in order to serve that content to local users.

    OnApp CDNaaS (CDN as a Service): a global Anycast DNS service for CDN that is hosted by OnApp at 14 global locations. CDNaaS determines which local edge servers are best suited to deliver content to end users, based on the status of those servers, the user’s location and other information.

    OnApp CDN Federation: a network of hosting providers offering CDN capacity, and a marketplace through which hosts can buy and sell capacity on demand. Hosts set their own prices for CDN resources, and the marketplace displays key information about the CDN resources (Points of Presence) available, such as bandwidth, location and server specifications.

Hosts can join the CDN Federation even if they do not contribute Points of Presence to the network. This makes it possible for a host to offer CDN services to its customers without owning any CDN infrastructure. OnApp acts as an intermediary between Federation members, handling charges and payments for CDN resources bought and sold through the marketplace.

Tim Varma, Vice President, Product Marketing at PEER 1 Hosting, a founder member of the OnApp CDN Federation comments: "Internet businesses need CDN services to quickly serve their customers, wherever they are in the world, and the OnApp CDN allows us to give our customers the global reach to make this happen. It means PEER 1 can bring huge value to our customers' businesses without having to invest in expensive infrastructure. With more POPs available to through the Federation, spanning Asia and Europe, we have the ultimate win-win of giving customers what they want as well as supporting new revenue streams."

OnApp’s CDN edge server software is provided free to hosts using OnApp CDN. Hosts using OnApp CDN pay OnApp a low fee per Terabyte of traffic that flows through the core CDN network (OnApp CDNaaS), and a small percentage of the OnApp CDN Federation marketplace transactions.

OnApp CDN launches at the HostingCon exhibition in San Diego on August 8th 2011.
OnApp is at Booth #313.