Timwi wrote:
Alex Regh wrote:
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There is a company namend Akamai out there, and as far as I know, they distribute websites like CNN and Microsoft
and (part of) LiveJournal ;-)
, which are (especially the first) updated frequently, and have some feedback features etc.
I can't claim any expertise on this, but as far as I understood it, Akamai specialises on serving static content. In the case of LiveJournal, this is mainly the user pictures - if you delete one and upload a new one, it will get a new URL, but if you edit an entry, it still has the same URL, so LiveJournal entries are saved on the central DB and not on Akamai.
On Wikipedia nothing is immutable under a given URL (not even images), except perhaps for small things like the stylesheet, but they are not worth it.
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Hello,
Akamai own servers at almost every single ISPs hosting rooms. A customer (yahoo, amazon, cnn ...) give akamai the content they want to be serve mainly pictures and video. Akamai put them on ALL of their server.
Then the customer need to change it's images / videos domains url to something like : d304-a5ea-custname.akadns.net or a custom domain name. When someone want the picture, the dns entry will be resolved by the akamai dns servers to the nearest server available. As akamai got servers everywhere, most of the time the user will download heavy content from a server directly at is ISPs instead of oversea / far.
This service does cost A LOT of money, and I don't think that's the point right now.
Simple example: pics.ebaystatic.com is a cname to a1654.g.akamai.net wich resolve for me to 193.45.10.72 (hosted at telia, the main peer of my isp) but it resolve to 212.155.193.143 (hosted at uunet fr for the uunet dns server). So I download ebay pictures from telia, while uunet france customers download pictures from uunet :o)
Sorry if it was too technical.
cheers,