SSDs are very different compared to the traditional hard disk drives in terms of how they write or retrieve data on microchips.

Advantages of SSD’s:

• There are no moving heads or spinning disks which results in faster random access of data because there is no “Seeking Motion” as required in HDD’s
• Consistent read performance because physical location of data is irrelevant for SSDs.
• Lack of moving parts provides higher mechanical reliability, lower power consumption and emits less heat than HDD’s.

SSD’s in the servers will allow customers to have faster file operations, ultimately speeding up our Content Delivery Solutions even further. With MaxCDN you can always be assured that we will be quick to react to new technology changes and always pass on any network architecture savings and benefits back to our loyal customers.

The improvements in this release allow us to be even more flexible then we were before.

New Features:

Custom Domains: From now on you are able to have  7 Custom Domains per Pull or Push Zone. On request we can provide you as many Custom Domains as you need.

Wildcards for Custom Domains: We developed a way to enable  wild cards for on Custom Domains, to help you to integrate your project even easier with our Content Delivery Network.

Content Disposition: Using this new feature, you can force a zone to have all files in it automatically downloaded (such as movies that the user should download and not stream). When enabled the Content Disposition Feature will set the modify the http header and force all files to behave as if the end-user chose the save as dialog. You will find this feature under the Advanced Zone Settings.

Automatic Secure Token Setup: It allows you to Setup a Secure VOD Zone just as easy as a normal Video on Demand Zone. This feature is only available on our Video Solution HDDN.com.

Bug Fixes:

UI issue on the popular files export report.

If you have any questions or feedback of any kind please contact us.

This is mainly a backend update that has included code cleanups and backend changes so our support and sales staff can support our clients better.

There are no visible changes that you will notice inside of the control panel itself, but rest assured, there was an update and the version number didn’t just miraculously change

The following are the new features / bug fixes that were included in this release:

New Features

• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to enable / disable the Query String caching
• [Push Zone] Added the ability to control the expires headers
• [VOD Zone] Added a feature to the VOD debug tool to debug secure streams
• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to manage the Origin IP when it is changed
• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to to view the header information to the Cache Inspector
• [All Zones] Added the ability to specify date ranges in graphs
• [Pull Zone / Push Zone] Added the ability to accept wildcard’s in the HTTP Referrer Protection
• [All Zones] Added the cache hits % and month to date hits to graphs.

Bug Fixes

• [All Zones] Fixed an issue with the cache hits by hour not reporting correctly in all cases
• [Pull Zone] Fixed an issue where the Origin IP was not updated when the Origin URL was changed

Have fun with it and let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

The following are the new features / bug fixes that were released in this version.

New Features

• [Pull Zone / Push Zone] Added valid referrers for zones to prevent  hot-linking under advanced options.
• [Push Zone] Added functionality to turn on gzip compression
• [Pull Zone] Added a cache inspector to verify all edges have the most  updated file cached
• [VOD Zone] Added a debug to test a file from all edge locations directly

Bug Fixes

• [Push Zone] Changed text for Push Zone replication time to reflect  current replication times.
• [Pull Zone / Push Zone / VOD Zone] Fixed a bug with the transfer per day  and node hit graphs.
• [Pull Zone] Fixed an erroneous error message for Purge Cache.
• [Login] Cleared up error when invalid login was used.

Have fun and let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

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

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.

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.

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

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.