Tonight, I just heard about the Coral Content Distribution Network. Say you have a large file that you want to distribute on the Internet in a load-balanced way, free from succumbing to the Slashdot effect. Put it on your webserver as normal. Then, if you add these 14 characters to the end of the hostname in your file’s URL:
.nyud.net:8090
the Coral Network will only download your file once and then handle the rest of the distribution for you in a peer-to-peer, distributed way.
Is that not freakin’ cool??!! Check it out.
6 replies on “Coral Content Distribution Network”
huh? i dont get it.
Chris, yeah, my short description assumed a lot. Basically, the Coral Content Distribution Network is a tool for people who want to offer large files on their websites for download. Let’s say you make a really cool video of yourself doing something weird and funny and you put it on your website for people to download. So far so good. But if enough people discover your video because someone posted the link on a very popular news site such as Slashdot, then your webserver will be swamped with people wanting to download your video. Your server will be over loaded, your account could be frozen because your visitors used too much bandwidth, or worse, your service provider might charge you a whopping large bill for all the extra bandwidth used.
This happens to people all the time. It’s called the Slashdot effect, and basically because of the the way the Internet is structured currently, popular sites get punished for being popular. The Coral Distribution Network helps you to avoid all this trouble by letting your users download the video from Coral, not from your actual webserver.
Does that make better sense now? The beauty of Coral is its simplicity. Anyone with a website capable of hosting one copy of their funny video can use the Coral Network without signing up for anything. They just need to append the magic 14 characters to the hostname in their video’s URL. Then it just works.
makes sense now. i think i understand. yay for clarity. just joking. thanks. later.
Update: I found out, buried deep in the Coral FAQ, that they limit caching to files less than 50 MB. You can still serve files greater than that limit, but the burden will be completely on your server, as if you weren’t using the Coral Network. It isn’t clear whether this limit will always hold true in the future. Check their website for up-to-date information.
hey, thanks for the heads up
It’s a terrific good ideea. I have one question: can anyone tell me such a program that may act like this:
– more people install this program
– when you want to acces a webpage that page is routed trough others “virtual proxy” so you remain anonymous?
– everybody remains anonimous as their trafic is routed trough others
– example : person A whant to talk to B. There are also persons C1, C2, C3, C4, etc. The conection is done randomly like this : A->C3->C45->C1->B.