See also: Detailed user guide for the CDN2 Drupal Module

Billing & Costs

Q: How much does it cost to use CDN2?

A: CDN2 costs nothing to get started with.

Q: What are the monthly fees for CDN2?

A: Only what you use. There are no other monthly fees for CDN2.

Q: What happens if I go over my limit on CDN traffic? Will I be billed for overages.

A: Ah, overages. That’s a word that just screams that a market is ripe for consolidation doesn’t it? CDN2 doesn’t have the concept of overages, so you’ll never be hit by a huge bill for going “over” your allowed network allowances.

Q: I’m a high volume customer, and I need competitive pricing - can you match it?

A: Absolutely. Because we aggregate traffic, we can be very competitive with other choices in the market. Contact us to discuss your options.

Q: How much does it cost to transcode video?

A: It’s simple: $2.50/GB for any normal video format ($0.0025 per MB, or $0.25 per 100 Megabytes); $4.00/GB for any HD video format ($0.004 per MB, or $0.40 per 100 Megabytes). And you’re only billed for what you use.

Q: What are the costs for storage?

A: We charge $0.25/GB for storage per month, so it’s extremely cost effective.

Q: How much does it cost to serve video content on CDN2?

A: This is difficult to answer, and depends entirely on what you’re serving. To give an example, a 10MB video (typical medium-size flash movie) served 100 times would produce approximately 1000 or 1GB of traffic on the CDN network: that’s only about $0.50 (fifty) cents. The cost to transcode the video would be $0.025 (two point five) cents. The first GB of storage is included in your account, and additional GB are just $0.25 cents a month. So, as you can see, it’s extremely cost effective, and there are no other hidden costs - all other fees are included.

Q: How much does it cost to switch CDN networks?

A: Nothing. It’s free, and we’re only working with CDN networks that will meet our standards for easily switching. We’re fans of the “love in” your customer philosophy - you should stay because you’re happy with the service, not because you signed a contract, so freedom of choice is key to our platform.

Q: When will I be billed?

A: CDN2 bills customers once a month, on the 1st of the month, for the previous month’s services.

Q: Is there a commitment required by contract?

A: No, the service is extremely unique in this respect. You can now access multiple CDN systems.

Q: How often do you change prices?

A: Right now, we’re in public beta, so we’re really looking for feedback on pricing. Our final pricing may change when we go to public launch, but we’ll make sure we treat our beta customers with the white glove treatment they deserve - rest easy.

Service Features

Q: Will you be able to handle my traffic spikes?

A: Absolutely, we can handle virtually any amount of traffic, as our platform auto-scales to handle demand.

Q: Can I see the service?

A: A public demo is forthcoming, but in the meantime we do have a great screencast you can look at that explains CDN2.

Q: Who owns what’s uploaded to my site?

A: Here’s the great news: you do. Unlike most video sites and services, you own your content on CDN2: we’re just helping you deliver it. So you don’t have to give up control and let someone else monetize your videos like on YouTube or Vimeo. You can also get a copy of your video content at any time (feature coming soon, for now contact us and we’ll help you out).

Q: CDN2 supports multiple networks? How is this possible?

A: CDN2 provides support for multiple CDN networks, enabling you to quickly and easily “flip” your account to another network with no downtime and minimal impact to your operations. This is an industry first, as far as we can tell. There’s no lock-in by vendors, but you can still get access to your choice of CDN networks at any time.

Q: Can I take advantage of falling prices in the CDN market?

A: Yes, you sure can. As we add more networks, you’ll be able to choose which network and price/performance point you serve your video from. So, if you’re not getting good enough performance from a cheap CDN, you can pick a higher-end one, and vice-versa, all with no penalty and no commitment, and minimal impact to your infrastructure - we’ll handle all the technical details.

Q: Where is the control panel for my account?

A: It’s in development, and should be out shortly. In the meantime, if you want help, please contact us.

Q: Is there an uptime guarantee for the service?

A: No, not during beta, but we’re considering adding one after our public beta period. The system is built to be highly available, and gets even more stable and highly available as it grows.

Q: How can I get support for CDN2?

A: Just give us a call or shoot us an email and we’ll do our best to help you. Remember though, support is limited to service problems, feature suggestions, and serious issues only. Unfortunately, we’re not able to help with installation support for free, but you might consider hiring us for a few hours if you need things set up.

Q: I want to use CDN2 on my Drupal sites, AND on my other sites in Joomla/Wordpress/Clearspace/etc. Can I do this?

A: Absolutely, that isn’t a problem, but you’ll need to access our web services API for your other platforms.

Q: I also want to use my account for Static CDN delivery. How can I do that?

A: This is really simple, and something we’re adding around the beginning of 2009.

Drupal

Q: Does CDN2 work with Acquia Drupal?

A: Absolutely. It works great.

Q: How much work is it to integrate CDN2 into my site?

A: It’s incredibly easy, and no risk. You sign up for an account, load one module, pop in the site credentials you get via email, and go. The module includes everything you need to get started, and fully integrates natively with Drupal so you can use it with other Drupal systems.

Q: What versions of Drupal do you support?

A: Drupal 5 and 6 are our target platforms right now.

Q: Will you support Drupal 7?

A: We’ll add support for Drupal 7 as soon as it’s a stable system.

Q: What modules are available?

A: We have modules available for Drupal 5. We have a Drupal 6 module in alpha, which will be released shortly. We’re also building a Drupal 5 views module to make it easy to add more advanced features to your site.

Q: Where can I get these modules?

A: The Drupal modules are available as Open Source contributions on Drupal.org, so you can download them there. We’re going to watch the issue queues for the modules, so feel free to post questions / suggestions and complaints there.

Q: How specifically does it integrate?

A: Our modules make each Drupal video into it’s own CCK field (CCK2 on Drupal 6) in Drupal, so it’s effectively part of a “node,” “page,” or any other content type you create. This means it can work natively inside of Drupal, have comments attached to it, be part of a more complex layout, etc. The sky is the limit in terms of what you can do with CCK and CCK2: it’s one of the most powerful features in Drupal. Our upcoming views module for Drupal 5 will improve upon that integration, making it extremely easy to add more complex functionality and player integration.

Q: How can I get updates?

A: We’re adding support for notifications of new version releases inside of the Module. However, for now, you should periodically check your version to make sure it stays up to date. There are Drupal modules available that can show you if there are any updates. We’ll be posting updates to our Drupal projects as soon as they are available.

Q: What makes this different from doing it myself with Open Source tools?

A: You might be capable of building your own video platform on Drupal without using us. But we feel that the lack of any development cost to get started, ongoing support and maintenance, low implementation risk, multiple CDN and end-to-end integration for all aspects of the system, and major scalability advantages outweigh a do-it-yourself value proposition. Besides, if you have something you feel is missing from the service that keeps you from using it, contact us and we’ll see if we can’t add it for you.

Technical

Q: I see that libmcrypt is required - but it’s not on my hosting service. What can I do about that?

A: This is a security precaution that prevents man-in-the-middle attacks to the service. We suggest you use it, but it’s not necessary to use the service. If you don’t have it installed on your hosting environment, please contact your hosting company. The service also requires PEAR and the Crypt_HMAC PEAR library. See the Getting Started Guide for more information.

Q: I want to use the system on multiple sites, can I do that?

A: Sure, not a problem. However, during beta we’re limiting the number of domains per account to one, so you’ll just need to set up multiple accounts. We’re going to add support for multiple domains per account, but we have a bit of development work to do to support reporting and billing. It’s important to not use your access identifiers on multiple sites as only the site you registered with will be notified when video transcoding is completed.

Q: Can I use CDN2 internally on non-public websites (such as locked down intranets)?

A: No, not yet. But we’re adding support for this. Right now, the services “pings” back to your site to publish your Drupal video. We’re making it so that you can optionally “pull” via a cron or cron service. Right now your site or sites must be on a publicly available URL in order for the service to function properly.

Q: What is transcoding (encoding)?

A: Transcoding (also called encoding) is the process of converting one video format into another. For the Web, most people serve video in just a few formats: Flash, Quicktime, AVI, WMV, etc. However, Flash is by far the most popular, so most of the time, people are encoding videos to that.

Q: Do you support UGC (User Generated Content)?

A: Absolutely, the platform is designed to work with UGC, and should provide an easy, turn-key service for capturing UGC.

Q: Are there limits on file sizes?

A: Not in our default system. You can upload, transcode, and serve via CDN virtually any file size.

Q: Do you recommend Quicktime for HD Video?

A: If you have a LOT of Flash 9 player clients, sometimes serving your video in Quicktime HD format can alleviate a skipping/slow behavior inherent in video using players with Flash 9 installed. If you experience this, you might consider using Quicktime (you can also change the format later). Alternatively you may adjust your player theme to require Flash 10.

Q: Do you support HD video?

Yes, CDN2 can handle HD video in most popular formats, such as Flash and Quicktime.

Q: My HD video seems glitchy, and pauses unnecessarily. What’s the deal?

A: After working through this problem with customers, we’ve determined that this is actually a problem with Flash Player version 9 or earlier. Upgrading to Flash 10 completely solves the problem, so for now, that’s our suggested solution. We’ve talked to a lot of people in the flash community, and this is a known problem.

Q: What flash players do you support?

A: By default, the CDN2 Module ships with support for flowplayer, as well as experimental support for the Dash Media player. Our Drupal module offers a plugin system to add new players, so you’re not limited to what we offer.

Q: Do I have to use the CDN service?

A: Nope, you sure don’t. You can use the system just for transcoding your videos. You might be able to do it the other way (just CDN), but we haven’t tried it.

Q: Do I have to use Drupal?

A: Absolutely not. You can use CDN2 with virtually any platform using our web services API. It’s just pre-integrated with Drupal.

Q: What kind of service is this? How does CDN2 work?

A: CDN2 is a Cloud-based platform built for high availability. It’s built as an extremely high performance, auto-scaling Cloud application. Even though the backend service is written in java, you access the service via SOAP-based Web Services, much like popular Amazon.com(r) services, enabling you to integrate it with applications written in virtually any programming language.

Q: Is it secure?

A: CDN2 is the handywork of several ex-Amazon programmers, so it uses many of the same Enterprise-grade security systems, and has a somewhat similar architecture to services like Amazon S3 and EC2. It’s very secure, and we’re always working to increase security.

Q: I already have a CDN contract with a major provider for my company. Can you support my existing contract?

A: Yes, we probably can. CDN2 can easily integrate with additional networks as part of our professional services. Contact us and tell us what you’d like to do.

Business

Q: Is there a reseller relationship available?

A: No, but we’ve thought about it. If you’re interested, contact us.

Q: Where is the advertising support?

A: CDN2 should easily work with most advertising platforms, as you can specify the player, and have full control over how the page loads. We’re looking at adding ad service support, and would appreciate your feedback about what you’d like to see.

Q: How does this compare with competitors?

A: Video platforms like Brightcove(R) charge $2.00-$4.00 per GB for delivery, take 1/2 (or a negotiated percentage) of your ad revenue, and charge 10-25 thousand dollars for setup. Then you get to integrate it into Drupal. By comparison, our system is 1/4 to 1/8th the cost for delivery, doesn’t cost you any ad revenue, and costs nothing for setup. Oh, and Drupal integration is free and easy.

Q: I’m concerned about performance. How good is the performance of CDN2?

A: It depends on the network. All of our CDN network partners are excellent, but there are some higher and and lower end providers. For example, Edgecast is the 4th largest CDN vendor, with a network that wraps the entire planet. They’re slightly higher cost, but provide a great deal of performance for business customers and offer a 100% network uptime guarantee. Other companies are really designed to be value-leaders, with price/performance tradeoffs (smaller networks, less time caching content on their “edge”), so it really depends on who you use. However, all of our vendors provide great service, or we don’t keep them.