Today we noticed that some of the VOD Zones are not reporting bandwidth, and this issue was also reported to us via our support system. After a short investigation, we found that clients who use RTMPT for video streaming are experiencing missed bandwidth usage reporting, while our clients who use regular RTMP and pseudo streaming will see normal bandwidth usage in their reports.

Our system engineers have been alerted of the issue and are now working on adding RTMPT traffic monitoring reporting to our normal bandwidth reports.

Recently we released our latest Video on Demand solution HDDN.com (High Definition Distribution Network). HDDN provides high speed video streaming capabilities for everybody. From enterprise media providers to individuals with a few videos to share.

HDDN distributes the video over a private Anycast IP network with the latest Wowza Media Server Advanced 2 software. The new Wowza Server  supports almost every file formats like Windows Media, Quick Time, Silver Light , the very popular Flash (FLV) and many more. We also support playback up to 1080p – full high definition to provide truly HD quality video streaming to all normal computing platforms, but also tablet PCs and handheld devices like the iPhone, and other Blackberry or Android based smart phones.

HDDN offers a wide range of monthly packages spanning different storage and bandwidth requirements, and a simple form-filling setup which can be finished in less than 10 minutes, the HDDN service will provide the Internet users to market their videos or broadcast their media all over the globe without the hassles of signing a long term contract.

YSlow for Firebug is a Firefox plug in launched by Yahoo! to find and point out the areas where a website can be further optimized. The YSlow is an open source solution which was first created internally by Yahoo! for benchmarking the performance of its own websites and later released for public usage.

Working of YSlow
YSlow actually works like a grader and gauges the performance of the webpages, and also provides a set of solutions which can pin point and improve the website performance. It comes with an inbuilt set of rules and also provides tools like Smush.it and JSLint.

Checking performance of your CDN
The second rule itself in the grading suggests making use of CDN for improved performance. YSlow has a slight drawback that it does not understand the performance of the CDN services unless the user explicitly configures the YSlow client for this. While, it comes with a wide range of popular CDN solutions, the list only covers the solutions that Yahoo! uses and hence list is not exhaustive.

Nevertheless, YSlow allows configuring of the other CDN providers by going to the “About:Config” in Firefox and entering the string preference by selecting a New String Preference, where the CDN name can be entered as the string value. Multiple CDN providers can be entered by specifying them using comma as separator.

Final Verdict:
All in all, though it needs to be configured a bit, specifically when it comes to tracking CDN performance; with the brand name of Yahoo! and an open-source solution, which works seamlessly with the popular Firefox browser, YSlow is definitely one of the grading tools that should be used for checking the performance of the website and optimizing it further.

From the YSlow FAQ:

How do I add my CDN hostname to YSlow for Rule 2?

Rule 2 says to use a content delivery network (CDN). The score for this rule is computed by checking the hostname of each component against the list of known CDNs. Unfortunately, the list of “known CDNs” are the ones used by Yahoo!. Most likely these are not relevant to your web site, except for potentially yui.yahooapis.com. If you want an accurate score for your web site, you can add your CDN hostnames to YSlow using Firefox’s preferences. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Go to about:config in Firefox. You’ll see the current list of preferences.
2. Right-click in the window and choose New and String to create a new string preference.
3. Enter extensions.yslow.cdnHostnames for the preference name.
4. For the string value, enter the hostname of your CDN, for example, mycdn.com.
5. Restart Firefox.

Do not use quotes. If you have multiple CDN hostnames, separate them with commas.

If you specify CDN hostnames in your preferences, they’ll be shown under the details for Rule 2 in the Performance view.

It’s a great day at MaxCDN!

We have reached and exceeded 1,000 active customers who took advantage of our $10 for 1TB grand opening special (normally $99.00).  We have served over 65,666,730,205 files! We thank each of our current customers and affiliates for your continued support!  If you are not a customer or affiliate yet, we welcome you to MaxCDN.

As part of our commitment to you, we will keep building out new cutting edge features each month to make our products even more useful to you.

Because of the amazing success of the introductory offer, we are extending a new limited-time offer for the first terabtye for $39.95 to new customers. For our existing customers, we have great rates for your account refills as well (as low as 3.9cents per GB)!

Stay tuned for more exciting MaxCDN product news and information and be sure to checkout our affiliate program.

Thank You!

The MaxCDN / NetDNA Team

What’s new?:

1. Updated API Documentation (in the Support section)

2. Some customers reported slowness in our control panel after the 1.4 release. We’ve made some changes to prevent these issues.

– optimized slow queries for the following methods (14 seconds was reduced to around 2 seconds) for the “Most Popular Files” graphs and widgets
– added client side caching for minified js and css files

Don’t hesitate to share any feedback with us.

A special thanks to Bryan, Billy and Steve for this release.