(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting and virtualized data center services provider SoftLayer Technologies (www.softlayer.com) has announced new advanced features for its proprietary content delivery network, CDNLayer, including a more secure procedure for accessing content and e-commerce sites, and cache clearing features to remove time sensitive material.
According to SoftLayer’s Tuesday announcement, both the new content authentication and cache clearing features are accessible and controllable through the SoftLayer Customer Portal and API. Since launching a year ago, CDNLayer has grown considerably due to its no-contract pricing model, whereby customers pay only $0.20 per GigaByte of bandwidth used. Between the third and fourth quarters of 2008, bandwidth consumption has grown five-fold.
“On the Internet, content is king. CDNLayer not only gives our customers consistent and reliable content delivery, it brings them a tool for managing and securing content access and digital rights,” SoftLayer chief technology officer Nathan Day said in a statement. “These new features extend CDNLayer’s capabilities for protecting the value of customers’ content and maximizing its return.”
Helping mitigate downtime due to unexpected traffic spikes and Internet bottlenecks, a CDN moves content geographically closer to end-users, which also helps improve speed. CDNLayer has 15 nodes in the Americas, two in Europe and four in Asia, comprising its global network. In addition to these basic roles, CDNLayer also provides customers a secure content access control panel, and the flexibility to write custom content access control tools.
Last month, SoftLayer announced it is offering IPv6, a protocol that uses 128-bit rather than 32-bit IP addresses, giving clients greater flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic.
Also in January, SoftLayer increased connectivity to its Washington DC and Seattle data centers bringing the SoftLayer’s total backbone network capacity to 200Gbps.
