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This blog post will detail four providers who have products and services focused on choosing between multiple Content Delivery Networks or load balancing between CDN’s.
 
For years, many people with a deep knowledge of the Content Delivery Network industry (i.e. Dan Rayburn at StreamingMedia.com , and Ryan Lawler at Contentinople ) have been wondering when and if there will be a period of consolidation in this market segment.  But even with the acquisition of Panther Express by CDNetworks in early 2009, there are still twenty some odd Content Delivery Networks providers in existence today. 
 
There has to be a reason that all these CDN’s continue to exist and that many new CDN’s continue to crop up every year.  The reason could simply be the continuing growth of the Internet.  As growth of the Internet continues, more and more companies can exist simultaneously as providers in a crowded market.
 
But there are real differences between the CDN providers.

Not all CDN’s are as reliable as others.  Also, not all CDN’s have the same features as others.  And finally, not all CDN’s have the same overall global coverage as others.  Because of these differences, as more and more company’s web sites grow, continue to use more services, and expand their sales and marketing efforts outside of North America, more and more companies are deploying a multi-CDN strategy. 

With the need, requirement, and use of the multi-CDN strategy growing, some new service providers have recently been jumping into the CDN market. These new providers have been adding to their product portfolios and the capability they're adding is the ability to diversify CDN providers.
 
To diversify CDN providers, there are generally two methodologies being deployed today.  The first is the capability to easily switch from CDN to CDN.  The second is the capability to load balance multiple CDN’s in a more automated way.  Let me describe each method in more detail below.
 
The first method of switching uses more primitive switching techniques.  The provider has relationships with more than one CDN and when the customer alerts the provider of a desire to switch, the provider then manually switches the customer from one CDN to another, or there are mechanisms that allow the customer to switch from one CDN to another. Examples of this method of CDN switching come from the One Pica Image CDN extension of the Magento Ecommerce platform, and Bandcon’s Content Networking service.
 
The second method of switching is to actually load balance and is more dynamic.  This load balancing method allows for a more automated switching between CDN’s.  It allows the customer to choose certain criteria (such as weighting, or time of day) and when that specified criteria is reached, the product switches from one CDN to another. 
 
One traditional CDN provider with this load balancing functionality is Limelight Networks.  They have a Load Balancer but restrict customers to moving no more than 45% of their traffic to another CDN and will only deploy the load balancer for very large accounts.  Level3, another traditional CDN provider, has a CDN Load Balancer, as well, but they only deploy it when helping customers transition from one CDN to Level3’s CDN.  Because of these restrictions, neither of these two CDN Load Balancers will be discussed here. 
 
There are also two new providers, Cotendo and DYN DNS, who have recently introduced Load Balancers.
 
In the upcoming four blogs, I’ll highlight each of these four providers (One Pica Image CDN for Magento, Bandcon, Cotendo, and DYN DNS) and discuss in a bit more detail each companies product or service for switching or load balancing between multiple CDN’s.