WebPageTest

***pmeenan*** · 06-21-2010, 09:27 PM

I'll answer what I know as a customer but probably best to contact them for authoritative answers. I'll also see if I can get someone over here to answer on the forums.

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: Hey there,

I have some questions about the maxCDN service.

1. I see the price for 1,000 GB bandwidth is on sale for $39.95. What happens if I do not use the 1,000 GB in a single month. Does the remainder carry over to the next month and so on?

The 1TB is good for a year so it carries from month to month until the year is up, then you need to re-up (wasn't clear to me initially either).

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: 2. Once the 1,000 GB bandwidth is used up, can I purchase additional GBs for 3.9 cents / gigabyte or does it raise to 10 cents / gigabyte? The $99 dollars that is crossed out has me a little confused.

It looks like it's 10c/GB after you cross the initial bulk purchase. I don't think you have an option to re-up for another TB at the reduced price.

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: 3. I have my own server with over a TB storage. Can I use my own server for storage or am i required to use their servers for storage?

You can use your own (which is how I recommend doing it because it is easier). Use them in an origin pull (set up pull zones) which basically runs them as a reverse caching proxy for your web site. When an asset is requested from the edge server, if it doesn't have it in it's cache it goes back to your server to fetch it (pretty much like the services layered on top of Google's app engine that you have been playing with).

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: 4. I was looking over the terms of service. I seen a part where it says my overall bandwidth usage can not be less than or equal to 8 Mb/s. Does this mean my bandwidth has to be at least 2494 GB per month in order to use your services? What happens if my bandwidth does not exceed this amount yet? If my math is wrong on the minimum bandwidth usage, please correct me.

"(d) Customer's overall monthly bandwidth usage is not less than or the equivalent of 8 Mb/s."

I found on wiki a Mb/s is equal to 125,000 bytes per second so 8 of those would be 1,000,000 bytes per second.

1,000,000 bytes / second * 60 second / 1 min * 60 min / 1 hour * 24 hour / 1 day * 31 day / month * 1 GB / 1,073,741,824 bytes = 2494 GB / month

This one I can't answer but my usage is WAY under that so I'd be surprised if that was the case.

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: 5. Is there a way for customers to monitor their bandwidth usage through your service?

They have a control panel where you can see bandwidth (aggregate and by POP), balance remaining, the cache hit ratio and a breakdown of the assets that are being served the most. I'm sure there's more there as well but it's more than enough to keep an eye on your utilization.

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: 6. Would I need to make any changes code-wise in order to get your services working with my website? Is there a guide for installation so I can see how difficult it would be to get this working?

The only code change is to reference the static assets using a fully qualified path pointing to the CDN but since you already have images* set up, it could be a pretty trivial change. The steps are basically:

1 - Set up a pull zone to mirror your origin server (I set up cdn.webpagetest.org to completely mirror http://www.webpagetest.org but you can point it to a specific path as well).

2 - Set up a CNAME that points to the host name they give you (optional but it look cleaner this way)

3 - Reference your static objects using the CDN path

That's it. You could even just change you images* CNAME's to point to their pull zone and do it without any code changes. As soon as the DNS change propagates it would be live (it might be a good idea to use different domains so you can make the code change on the back-end quickly and not have to wait for DNS though).

(06-21-2010 03:34 PM)green-watch.org Wrote: On another note, I had some questions which I found answers to that other people might want to know.

There is a maxCDN affiliate program here:
https://secure.maxcdn.com/affiliate/

Edge Location List here:
http://www.maxcdn.com/network.php

Sincerely,
Travis Walters