EDGECAST Description

EdgeCast Networks was a US-based content delivery network provider that was founded in 2006.

Within the CDN market EdgeCast is still a familiar name even though the company was acquired by Verizon in 2013. Around the same time, Verizon acquired digital media streaming company Uplynk to provide more ways to stream media over its network. Both services live on as The Verizon Digital Media Services platform or VDMS, which includes a wide set of products for security, video (live streaming and video-on-demand), application delivery, ad network integration and storage.

Verizon Digital Media Services is connected with the Google Cloud Platform via the CDN Interconnect program. The Verizon CDN joins the ranks of Fastly, Level3, CloudFlare, Highwinds, and Akamai, in an effort improve the transfer speed and cost effectiveness of data between the Google backbone and their own. Due to the peering agreement, a more cost-effective and reliable delivery path is established, benefitting customers on both sides. Clients using a Google Cloud origin with the Verizon Digital Media Services delivery platform/ EdgeCast CDN enjoy a discount to their egress origin traffic.

While Verizon has its ‘own’ CDN in the form of (what used to be) EdgeCast, its Verizon Enterprise website still states that the company works together with Akamai to provide CDN services to the Verizon business customers. Comparing the two can be done here. Verizon is continuing to invest in the quality and coverage of their delivery platform. Currently, a large part of their focus seems to be on expanding their coverage and capacity in India. The Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS) platform has, and has seen a number of high-profile customers such as Atari, Tetris, Soundcloud, Pinterest, tumblr, Magento and BitDefender.

EDGECAST Resellers

Warpcache is one of the resellers of EdgeCast, and offers the CDN both in an integrated multi-CDN solution, and separately.

For a custom EdgeCast quote, general pricing information or simply to learn more about the company, contact Warpcache here.

CACHEFLY Description

CacheFly is a Chicago-based CDN provider, with over 40 Points of Presence (PoPs) spread over six continents. Next to the usual locations, Cachefly has PoPs in India, Qatar, Egypt and South Africa.

The Cachefly network is optimised for throughput, making it more suitable for the delivery of large files.

Instead of DNS-based global loadbalancing, the company’s CDN infrastructure relies on TCP Anycast routing.

CacheFly offers the usual features in the CDN industry such as instant purge, origin shielding, real-time reporting and sub-accounts. They also offer a 100% availability SLA and ²⁴⁄₇ support.

Reviewer website TopTenReviews named CacheFly #1, Gold and Excellence award winner in the ‘Small Business CDN’ category for the third year in a row. Factors taken into account in the weighing were Performance, Setup & Compatibility, Security and Help & Support.

The 10 CDNs that were reviewed are, in order of score:

1. CacheFly
2. MaxCDN
3. Highwinds
4. EdgeCast
5. CDN77
6. Internap
7. BitGravity
8. Level3
9. CDNetworks
10. Amazon CloudFront

It should be noted that the selection of CDNs that were reviewed is incomplete, and seemingly arbitrary. At the time of writing, TopTenReviews is a customer of Akamai.

Customers in the Cachefly portfolio include, or have included: The Economist, Magellan, Jelly Belly, Bank of America, Budweiser, Trillian, Ars Technica, Virgin Games, Ameritrade, Cartoon Network, McKesson, Twit.tv, Blue Shell Games, BackBeat Media and Toyota.