CacheFly: The Lightning-Fast Content Delivery Network

Speed may not be everything. However, it is an important aspect of any web project. Especially when distributing significant amounts of data, such as images or other multimedia content, it's crucial to make sure that the user receives them as fast as possible. Too much buffering or long loading times can already be enough to make visitors leave your website. Most of the time, fast transfer of such content can only be done reliably using a content delivery network (CDN). CacheFly is one of them, providing speed, safety, and reliability.

Fast Transfer - Worldwide

One of CacheFly's selling points is the fact that its network is connected to over 40 internet nodes all over the world, resulting in naturally fast data connections. In Germany, the node DE-CIX in Frankfurt is among the strategic hubs. That's because DE-CIX is the largest internet node worldwide when measuring by throughput. CacheFly is connected to strategically important nodes in both North America, and Europe. According to measurings by the analysis service CloudHarmony, CacheFly is one of the fastest content delivery networks in these regions. Its CDN can reach a throughput of over 18 megabytes per second when dealing with large files. Due to the rather slim presence in other areas like Africa, and Asia, the service nets a lower bandwidth there. Worldwide Points-of-Presence - Mainly in North America and Europe Nonetheless, CacheFly's speed is nothing to sneeze at, even leaving some providers with local servers behind.

Costs Between Three and Ten Cent Per Gigabyte of Traffic

To convince you of CacheFly's speed, you can conduct a test for two weeks. The service's regular prices depend on total traffic. If you stay below ten terabytes of traffic, you'll pay 10 cents per transferred gigabyte. The higher the total traffic, the lower the price per gigabyte. Starting at 500 terabytes, you'll only pay about three cents. The cost for the web space is 2 USD for the first 10 gigabytes, 1.50 USD for the next 40 gigabytes, and one USD for everything above that. You will only be charged for the web space you actually use. If you only use one gigabyte of storage, that's all you will need to pay for. There's a transparent overview that displays all costs for web space and traffic in the respective regions, being North America/Europe, Asia, Australia/Africa, as well as South America/India. This way, you'll always have an eye on your monthly expenses. However, the minimum charge will be 50 USD a month, being the fee required to use the service. As you can tell from the prices, the service was mainly designed for those that need to transfer large amounts of data. For most of the "standard" providers, the mentioned volumes will already exceed the provided web space, as well as the monthly traffic.

Upload Via FTP, Security Via HTTPS

Comfortably upload your media content via an FTP access. You also have the option to set up additional FTP users, which only gain access to individual folders, if necessary. You'll receive a subdomain in the form "account name" followed by ".cachefly.net." This allows you to comfortably integrate your content into your web project, using your content management system. Simple User Interface On demand, all content is available to you via a safe HTTPS connection. Thanks to Gzip compression, your content will be transferred even faster. Thus, CacheFly assures the most optimal compression and speed. If you prefer using a custom domain to access the CacheFly files, you can deposit domains, as well as subdomains, which you want to be used for the transfer. You simply need to adjust your web host's DNS settings, so that the domain is redirected to the IP address of CacheFly.

Easily Creating Expiry Headers

Particularly for large files, caching makes sense, preventing reload whenever it's possible. Of course, you should think about for how long a file should stay in the cache. Images often remain unchanged, which is why you could set a generous expiry date. CacheFly provides an easy to use management for expiry headers. This way, you can define for how long the respective content should be cached, for single folders, or file types. If necessary, define multiple rules for the expiry header, and prioritize them. Blocking any referrers, and overwriting them with MIME types if needed is very easy as well. Instead of solving all of these tasks using a ".htaccess" file, CacheFly provides a clean management interface, allowing you to make all of these settings.

Extensive Statistics - Also in Real Time

To make sure you know when which content is downloaded, CacheFly gives you comprehensive statistics. You can use them to create daily summaries, but you can also demand information over which node this content was delivered, or which countries the requests came from. Real Time Statistics Keep You Updated Another interesting and important aspect is the option to receive an overview of flawed requests. Then, CacheFly will create a report on all 404 errors, and tells you which missing data was accessed. The real time statistics are currently in a beta stage. These will inform you about how many requests are currently made each second. Whenever necessary, comfortably download all reports and statistics as a PDF file.

Suits Both Small and Large File Delivery

Fast and reliable transfer is of particular importance when it comes to video and audio content. With an availability of 100 percent, CacheFly guarantees that your content will be available at any time. This erases the risk of a service outage. Did I mention that images are compressed  on-the-fly to speed up delivery and minimize bandwidth load? However, CacheFly is not only a good choice for multimedia content. For example, you can also use the service to provide applications for download. If your customers depend on your software, they will be more than angry when they can't download it reliably. Not Only Suitable for Video and Audio Content When offering software-as-a-service (saas), instead of traditional applications, an outage-proof service is even more important. To guarantee users that they will always have a fast, outage-free access to your service, CacheFly is the right partner for you.

Conclusion

When safety, speed, and reliability is important to you, CacheFly is a perfect choice. The service is very transparent, and easy to use, and provides everything that helps you distribute significant amounts of data worldwide, fast, and outage-free. The prices are as transparent and flexible. The two-week trial allows you to test the service in-depth. When comparing it to your "average" web host, you'll notice a significant difference in file download speed. Talking of speed, I guess you have already heard about Google taking performance as a ranking factor. Speeding up your site's content does good to your search engine ranking. And CacheFly delivers your content lightning-fast. The conclusion is yours to draw;-) So then. I'd suggest you make up your own mind and give CacheFly a chance. Sign up for their 14-day free trial and see what they can do for you. (dpe)