How often in this biz do you hear the term CDN? What does it mean to you?
 

I have been working for a while, in a loosely affiliated way, on a software project that has some applications in adult, and in the course of this, I have some guys, with no experience of adult internet biz, telling me the project needs a CDN.

What are the different meanings of CDN for ya'll, and how do CDNs work?

Model out example CDNs for me.

I've seen that in URL's before - I think to pages that have hosted banner farms for an affiliate program:
http://cdn.alleliteads.com/gfkings/banners/index.html
...but I never bothered to look it up & see what it means...and I'm not about to do that now |nahnah|

CDN = content distribution network. Load balancing across multiple data centers rather than just multiple servers within a single data center. Primary use is for high volume content heavy web sites. Content is hosted and sync'd on servers in multiple data centers so that no one data center or server bank has to handle the entire load. Adult sites with video content are prime candidates for using a CDN, if the traffic volume warrants.

yeah, Toby, that's the meaning they had in mind.

When I hear CDN I think of the companies that provide leased content for paysite networks, like say webmastercentral.

But, what they want is the optimized server network.

Youtube is a massive CDN. User in Texas uploads a video, and when a guy in Australia watches it, it's being streamed from a server near him since the CDN distributed it to servers all over.