(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Content delivery network ecosystem and platform provider Aflexi (www.aflexi.net) has unveiled its new platform for web hosts, letting them buy and market excess server capacity and bandwidth.
Demonstrated at HostingCon 2009 in Washington DC, the FlexiMart platform allows partners to share infrastructure, by letting them buy, sell and trade capacity, on-the-fly, both at a fixed price and through bidding, according to Aflexi. It also provides affordable CDN services among web hosting competitors, as well as a powerful search engine, enabling regional bandwidth searching that quickly discovers all the available bandwidth within specific regions offered by different operators.
“[Aflexi] started three years ago while running my own web hosting company,” Aflexi chief executive officer Whei Wong said in a statement. “I envisioned that CDN services were the way for web hosting companies to move up the value chain. Existing single-server solutions were not sophisticated enough to serve increasingly rich broadband content. Building a CDN for myself would incur massive investment for the delivery software, let alone the network infrastructure. It then struck me that instead of building the delivery software solely for myself, it could be licensed to other web hosts so they can mutually benefit from it. Three years later, my vision is becoming reality.”
Aflexi lets buyers enhance the traffic performance at desired locations by purchasing region-specific bandwidth instead of global bandwidth. For instance, if a US content distributor needs a few temporary edge nodes in Europe for a popular German-language video stream, they can log on to Aflexi FlexiMart and find the best deal.
Malaysia-based Aflexi has long advocated “collaborative” content delivery management solutions, having launched a CDN service in January, which provides web hosts and content distributors high performance, scalable and secure content distribution via a network of ISPs rather than relying on a single network or a handful of providers like some CDNs.
Aflexi is offering a special free trial period for its Aflexi CDN, which includes unlimited traffic for a limited period.
