Timwi wrote:
Alex Regh wrote:
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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,
--
Ashar Voultoiz
fr:Hashar