This presentation provides a good introduction.
What is PCDN
PCDN is an affordable content delivery network, optimized for large files like video.
PCDN is highly distributed, being comprised of many small nodes. In this aspect, it stands between CDN powerhouses like Akamai, Limelight, or Level 3 and P2P networks. Each node is a toaster size NAS appliance, running Linux with Apache based custom software and housing a RAID of high capacity SATA drives.
Nodes are connected to Internet backbones via residential or commercial fiber optics hookups like Verizon FIOS or PAXIO with minimal bandwidth of 20 Mbps, usually burstable to 100 Mbps. Some nodes are hosted at colocation facilities.
Affordability and mostly residential deployment base make us People's CDN. Also, we share profits with people (node operators) proportionally to the traffic served.
PCDN is designed by people who serve video for living. Our experience with various hosting solutions contributed greatly to the success of PCDN. We knew what we wanted, and we got it right.
Features
The easiest way to highlight PCDN features is to compare it to a cloud storage solution like Amazon S3.
Our content management is not based on a proprietary API. Instead, we offer standard protocols including FTP, SFTP, SCP, and RSYNC. With PCDN, you do not depend on homemade clients, but instead use mature common tools.
We do not organize content in flat "buckets". Instead, we offer standard file system with subdirectories. Moving and renaming files is natively supported.
We do not manage ACLs: everything is private. It is our customer's business to authenticate (and charge) their users, and then serve them content via secure links to PCDN.
We support file grouping, for example multiple parts of one video in file sequences like movie1-1.flv ... movie1-10.flv or folders like VIDEO_TS. Files in a group are stored and migrated together.
We are fully transparent. Our customers know exactly where the files are and can specify where they want them to be via custom content migration policy. Service comes not from some vague "East Coast datacenter", but from specific individually accessible nodes.
We provide edge delivery without additional "edge caches". Our large and highly distributed network of small nodes allows to pick a perfect match based on content availability, network distance, and server load.
S3 is no web hosting: you cannot even have a default document (index.html). PCDN supports PHP and MySQL (Perl, Python etc. also available). You can have any kind of custom processing with a LAMP application.
We accept mail-in USB and ESATA drives for content upload. This helps to avoid big pain of pushing your terabytes upstream for months.
Last but not least, we charge less. Many small NAS appliances we use are cheaper than large datacenters, and low deployment costs are passed on to customers.
All these differences do not prevent us from offering great compatibility. If you currently use Amazon S3, transition to PCDN is very easy. You do not even need to change link signing code or access keys: we accept S3 URLs as is.
What we are not
We are not well suited for millions of small files. PCDN is optimized for file sizes around 1 GB. There are no limits, but range from 0.2 to 5 GB is recommended.
We do not offer video streaming; only progressive downloads (however mms:// URLs are handled by Apache). We do not offer DRM. We support all mime types, but we do not process any: just serve files over HTTP (however, you can host a LAMP web site with your files for custom processing).
Pricing
Affordable CDNs like CacheFly or Coral are great solutions if you have hundreds of megabytes of content. For terabytes, they are actually very expensive. Amazon S3 with CloudFront is likely the cheapest solution, but still storing and serving N TB of content still costs roughly N thousand dollars a month. For startups and small businesses such costs are often prohibitive.
At PCDN, we charge approximately half the price of Amazon. Pricing is based on units of 1 TB of storage and traffic per month (STM). One STM covers storing 1 TB and serving 1 TB downstream. Upstream is free and transaction fees are zero. If your storage and traffic needs are not balanced 50/50, you can store less and serve more or vice versa - for the same price, up to 2 TB of arbitrarily blended usage.
We charge just $100 per STM.
Join now
We welcome both customers and providers.
If you store and serve large content, and you are not yet ready for the pricey first tier CDNs, become our customer and save money. If you migrate from Amazon S3, there is very little to do: you can get up and running in a few hours.
If you have fiber optics connection available in your area, join us as node operator. We will pay your internet bill and more, plus you will participate in profit sharing. There is nothing to "do" per se, just hook up the toaster size NAS appliance we provide.
