Distribution Cloud is a reseller of Akamai’s content distribution network. Distribution Cloud starts at $150 per month (with a 12-month commit, slightly higher for month-to-month) for access to the best content distribution network in the world and the leader of Content Distribution Networks. This is a little-known secret and one of the first services to resell Akamai’s coveted Site Delivery™ platform which is so well known for caching and dramatically improving performance for large enterprise-class Web sites. Although, Distribution Cloud is a heavily stripped down version of Akamai’s Site Delivery™ platform in terms of features. I was unable to get much information about Distribution Cloud’s arrangement with Akamai, although they are both located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The beauty of Akamai’s CDN is that it passes through a DNS cname, so there is no need to manually store objects. You tell DC what you want cached, point your www cname to Akamai/DC and then presto, your Web site is cached and distributed worldwide. The process for setting up Distribution Cloud and measuring it’s results are simple and quickly implemented.

Configuring Distribution Cloud

Step 1) Sign up with Distribution Cloud
Step 2) Configure what you want cached by Distribution Cloud
NOTE: I cached HTML, Javascript, and Images in my proof-of-concept
Step 3) Point your www DNS cname at Distribution Cloud / Akamai

And you’re done. Seriously, that’s all there is to it.

Once my www DNS record was pointed at Distribution Cloud and Akamai, an nslookup returned the following result:

At this point, I knew my site was cached in Distribution Cloud/Akamai and I began measuring performance response times.

Performance Testing Results

The proof is in the pudding, you can see impressive gains in overall Web site load times once TheBitsource.com had been cached with Distribution Cloud. This site was a hosted on Godaddy.com shared hosting at the time and is brazenly on the lower-end of a well-performing Web infrastructure the response time was an average of 4 seconds down from 8. For reference, with an 8 second load time, one might as well not even have an Internet presence to a certain extent. There is a direct correlation between Web site response times and the number and revenue.

Performance Results from Keynote for TheBitsource.com with and without Distribution Cloud

Performance Data from Keynote for TheBitsource.com with and without Distribution Cloud

Analysis

Due to the high cost of global caching, these services typically only been feasible for larger businesses,. Distribution Cloud breaks down the barriers and provides access to Akamai’s world class CDN priced for anyone who wants blazing speeds on their website, starting at $150 per month. It should be noted that services such as Akamai will need to continue to provide innovations and feature-sets that are specific to large-enterprises with complex needs as services such as Distribution Cloud and LimeLight make Web site content distribution more affordable. The other alternative for Akamai is to offer these services to a market which they otherwise haven’t been focused on before, which is the small business.

Distribution Cloud pricing is based on the amount of traffic served from a Web site. If a Web site gets a lot of traffic the usage bill can get high, but this assumes that if a site is getting a lot of traffic it is also generating a lot of revenue. As the data reflects, using the Distribution Cloud and Akamai CDN results in massive performance improvements on the test Web site, TheBitsource.com.

Bottom Line: Distribution Cloud does an extremely effective job of making the exceptional Akamai Content Delivery Network and services available to the end-user and small business. The Distribution Cloud CDN sets itself apart from other “Cloud CDN’s” in that it doesn’t require manual storage of objects into the cache in order to be distributed throughout the CDN. It is safe to say that there are two classes of CDN’s in this respect, those that automatically cache a Web site through a DNS cname and those that do not.