CDN News | 5centsCDN Inc.

Facebook live and restreaming is now enabled with 5centsCDN CDN infrastructure.

People love facebook videos and they would love watching the videos buffer free and with high quality. Now you can stream your events live on facebook without any hassle by connecting to 5centsCDN CDN network.

Before proceeding you should know what is live streaming and restream.

Live streaming is going live on facebook with smartphone camera or with the professional camera. Restreaming is you have a source stream and you would like to restream it on facebook.

Live Streaming is possible on facebook with just a click on your smartphone. But the quality of the streaming that matters which will not be clear as you expect and will start buffering which will irritate the audience. To start high quality live streaming you need a professional camera, high quality CDN and an encoding software.

The step by step procedure on how to enable your facebook live or restream is detailed here at our help center page.

Here are the Pros and Cons of Facebook live or restreaming.

Advantages

Facebook is a social media platform with a lot of built in audience. So targeting your audience is not difficult

Facebook streaming is completely free. You don’t want to pay any money to facebook for streaming your content. All you need is a CDN, encoding software and a high quality camera for better and smooth streaming

It will be useful if you don’t have a website to stream your live event. Simultaneous streaming to facebook and your website is also good to reach more audience.  

Disadvantages

Facebook can only stream upto 4 hours continuously. To stream again you need to push the source stream again. So it is not recommended for live channels and events which lasts for more than 4 hours. However some channels are streaming when it comes to important events and flash news.

Facebook has a maximum resolution of only 720pixel which is not a complete high definition

We are glad to inform you that 5centsCDN has a new MBT+ with adaptive bitrate streaming technique, which detects the internet speed at the user end and set the stream accordingly, ensuring awesome viewing experience.  

MBT+ with adaptive bitrate streaming technique eases the  navigation between SD, HD and UHD.

One source original or re-stream of high quality is adequate for content owners to distribute adaptive bitrate streaming  to multiple devices

Our GPU based transcoding architecture is powerful that reduces the complexity and operational pricing, putting an end to bandwidth bottlenecks, and allows the users to experience the high quality stream on any devices they wish.

To enable transcoding, you must have at least a single publishing point in your 5centsCDN account.

5centsCDN now supports DASH Streaming (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). It’s also called as MPEG DASH.

What is MPEG DASH and its overview?

It has been a challenge for content creators over the years, to make their online content  reach multiple devices and platforms without a problem

Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) developed a standard ( MPEG-DASH) that is able to stream content across the internet..

DASH streaming is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique delivered via HTTP server that allows smooth streaming to multiple devices and platforms.

There would be a chance to confuse MPEG DASH with transport protocol, TCP is the transport protocol that MPEG DASH uses.

How does it work?

MPEG-DASH divides the video into small segments before it is being played, these segments are duplicated and encoded to a variety of bitrates.  

The manifest files are able to identify the chunks of files and  requests of a single file.

These files are sent via the network and when stream begins to play, the small segments gets integrated and thereby enables smooth streaming of content.  

Benefits

Content publishers can give rise to a single set of files for both transcoding and streaming that can be compatible with as many devices as possible from desktop, mobile to OTT

It works on all HTTP servers and on of the most commonly used media servers which means the service providers does not need to invest  in dash streaming infrastructure

It enables removing technical difficulties in compression and delivery

Users will be able  to reduce transcoding price.

Ad insertion is possible

It supports DVD options such as rewind, forward and seeking

It can be beneficial for users with slower internet connection where the stream can be adjusted according to the connection speed.

While HDS, HLS and Smooth Streaming are not codec agonistic, DASH streaming is codec agnostic which means it supports any coding formats such as H.264, H.265 and VP9 etc

Conclusion

HLS and MPEG-DASH are the streaming technologies that supports the adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) technique, thereby improving your stream quality. 5centsCDN now supports both HLS and MPEG-DASH.

We are excited to announce the new feature, External Auth Control, added to our control panel. External Auth Control analyses the user requests based on different parameters and authorize the genuine requests to access the stream.

This move can enable our clients to determine the authenticity of the user/viewer requests for the stream. Previously, ie., before the external auth control implementation, we secure our stream based on Domain lock, Geoblock, RTMP authentication and the Secure Token. Now with the addition of External Auth Control to our security options, we can proudly say that your stream is 100% secured.

How it works?

If the user/viewer requests the stream, the user related information such as IP, IP referer, name of the stream requested, request type, etc., will be sent to an external server for approval before the edge server delivers the stream.

Based on the information collected from the user, the authorization server returns different status codes. If the HTTP status code returned is 200, then the request is approved and the stream session will begin for the user, and if the status code returned is 401 or 403, the authentication fails and the stream will be blocked.

You can also whitelist certain IPs and prevent the IPs from the authentication check. For example, if you are familiar with some of the genuine audience who are going to watch the stream, you can whitelist their IP address and they will receive the stream immediately once they request without the authentication check.  

Who can use it?

The External Auth Control is available to all of our clients regardless of the plan they belong to. External Auth Control is available for Live streams, VOD and DVR streams.

We are improving our control panel each now and then to make it more user-friendly.

We are adding new features frequently, fixing the bugs if any, and updating the existing features as well. If you see the September 2017 month alone, there were 7 updates happened.

We have created the new page release notes which will give you a complete overview of the latest updates we have released and you can bookmark and visit this page to find if there are any updates happened in our control panel recently.

We love your feedback and if you notice any bugs in our control panel or you need any additional features to be added to our control panel, we are eager to hear from you. You can write to help@5centscdn for your feedback and queries related to the control panel.

Good News! We have a dedicated hub for the developers. You will find here the complete documentation of our API records that will help you get started with your integration to 5centsCDN.

The home page has two sections. The top section has a search box, where you can search with your query and find the necessary pages, or, you can use the bottom section which has various tabs under where you can find the necessary links to the pages you are looking for.

The developer hub has API for live streams, Zones and WAF. It has links to our website, help center, developer’s forum, service status and control panel to help you with the navigation.

You will also get 24x7 live chat support from 5centsCDN support team.

The API documentation will be frequently updated and you will find more options and API records coming soon.

We are excited to announce that our new Web Application Firewall has been released and it is one of our most awaited releases this year. It will enable you to secure your website and with this integration, you will be able to perform the following from our control panel:

Enable and disable WAF

Get DDoS Config

Update DDoS Config

View WAF Policies

Update WAF Policies

View, Add, Update and Delete WAF Custom Rules

View your WAF Traffic & Events

It adds an extra layer of security to your websites. Here are some of the features associated with the Web Application Firewall.

Bot security

Bots are responsible for more than 97 percentage of attacks on web applications.  Our renowned algorithms prevent even the most modern bots from attacking the login pages, web forms and susceptible resources, although the ip address of bots frequently change

Scraping Security

Professional scrapers target directories, publishers, and content libraries and they can pull out confidential information from your business. Our Web Application firewall automatically detects automated agents and human threats and forms a centralized intelligence base to protect your site and site assets.

Enterprise Control

Our Web Application Firewall will provide you complete control over the traffic entering your site. You can block, whitelist and challenge traffic based on a set of rules and parameters within the control panel such as behavior profiling, IP reputation, and OWASP risks.

As all of our services are carry out instantaneously WAF rules are also set right away so that you can focus on other tasks that grow your business

Total visibility

Get statement regarding WAF behavior, after effects, country, IP address, date and time. Event manager can easily view and control the traffic activity, statistics will show you the threat data regularly so that you can locate and examine the threats impacting your site.  

We are excited to inform you that our Live Stream API is released and it will enable you to create, manage and administer your live streaming. Live stream API is designed for companies who would like to integrate and manage our Live streaming from our end within their applications.

Through live stream API Beta you can able to perform basic as well as advanced live stream actions such as creating and updating Publish, PullPublish, Restream, Delayed Stream and ABR using the API key.

Publish

You can create, update and delete the live stream. The update process involves updating the live stream, Domainlock, Geoblock, SecureToken and RTMP Authentication. Users with DVR can update the DVR too.

Pull Publish

You can create, update and delete the PullPublish stream. Creation and update need a Source URL to Push from and an endpoint URL to push to. It also includes an audio-fix which is optional that can able to transcode the audio stream to aac using ffmpeg if required.  

Restream

You can create, update and delete the Restream using the source stream. For re-streaming you need a source streaming URL. The update process involves updating the Source stream, DomainLock, Geoblock, SecureToken and DVR.

Delayed Stream

You can create, update and delete delayed stream. The update process includes updating the Timeshift streams, DomainLock, Geoblock and SecureToken.

ABR

You can create, update and delete adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming. The update process cover updating the ABR stream, Source stream, DomainLock, Geoblock and RTMP Authentication.    

5centsCDN recently launched PAY AS YOU GO CDN plan using which you can easily accelerate your website and on sign up, we throw in a free credit of $15 which is equal to 1 TB CDN bandwidth, with 10 GB storage forever. The per GB pricing after utilizing the free credit is just 0.0143 USD globally.

Customers prefer websites that load faster, hence if there is any slowdown in loading your WebPages, there is a huge risk of missing big business. If your website delivers software, videos, games or have high traffic which could slow it down; this plan is just the right pick for you.

Pay As You Go is only available for our HTTP Website Acceleration service.

We do not recommend Pay As You Go for Live Streaming as there are few limitations applicable.

We can only Pull and Deliver HLS

Only 3 origin location: San Jose, Virginia and Amsterdam

No real-time status

Delivery region is limited to the VOLUME NETWORK PoP's

Additional features

Purge

You can manage the content that is being served via our CDN using purge feature. Purge allows you to delete a single or all files in the edge server

Origin Shield

Our origin shield is unique and it protects your origin server from multiple requests of our CDN edge nodes. Our origin shield ensures stability, control and security which can be achieved by complete redundancy deployment. Being a protection layer, origin shield hides the hosting area of origin contents to the end users.

SSL

You can use our free shared SSL, or the custom dedicated SSL which we can install for you for a nominal monthly fee. You need to just copy & paste the SSL, intermediate certificates and private key to our control panel. Our technical support team will be there online to assist you anytime.  

Web Application Firewall

Web Application Firewall is built from scratch to defeat today’s real world threats such as bots, DDOS attacks, hackers, spammers and legitimate traffic. WAF is available to all customers from August 15.

Here are the few points to remember before subscribing to the plan

You will be provided with $15 free credit and 10GB storage on sign up

You need to add funds to your account to continue the service. 

No expiry for credits

BW charged per GB basis

Minimum top up is 15 USD

Overages has to be paid in 24 hours, if no credit is available

Usage threshold emails are sent once the customer exceed 70% usage and there is no credit available. 

Your account will have 100 zones by default. For additional zone, you need to contact our sales team

A one size fits all CDN strategy will not be a fit for an online business that scales content to the global audience. Managing content delivery costs would also be a worry. 5centsCDN comes with traffic management solution powered by NS1 and Dyn, that builds the seamless multi-CDN infrastructure while controlling the cost and performance of your CDN.

Traffic Director is the most advanced feature added to our CDN. Traffic Director enables you to route your CDN traffic to the preferred MultiCDN PoP. We have partnered with four of the best CDN’s,  LimeLight, CDNetworks, StackPath & HighWinds whose delivery capability or PoP’s are different in the various regions. The best performance CDN nodes will be automatically detected, and your CDN traffic will be routed there safely and securely.

Traffic director from 5centsCDN works intelligently and can able to monitor the packet loss and latency correctly if any occurs.

Figure Explained

Users watching the content from different devices

Traffic Director routes the traffic to the best performance CDN nodes

If one CDN PoP has any issue, the traffic will be routed to the next best performance CDN nodes which are close to the user’s location

Traffic Director rule sets can be enabled via our control panel. If you switch to our enterprise plan, Traffic Director feature will be available to you right on your dashboard.

You can start by setting the global delivery, ASN filter, and country filter. From there you can improve to a more advanced traffic management solution considering the business logic and real-time performance telemetry.

Implementation and further use of Traffic Director

To implement and to use the Traffic Director, follow the below steps:

1. Log into your 5centsCDN console. 2. On your client area, click on the Manage CDN which will lead you to your Dashboard. 3. On the left side tab, click on the drop-down menu Rules which is under Traffic Director and then click on Rule Set. 4. It will list your Default Rule Set via which you deliver the traffic.Click on the same. 5. This will take you to the detailed view of the Traffic Director.

The above steps are demonstrated in the below illustration.

Initially, you have to set your Global Delivery to your desired CDN by toggling the button to Enable mode, for, e.g., let’s say if you need StackPath for your global delivery, all you have to do is to switch the ‘Disable’ button to ‘Enable.' This will ultimately route your traffic to StackPath, and your global delivery will be done through it.

Once you have enabled your Global Delivery, you can check your status of your rule set and its CDN by doing a quick ping check with your rule set, and you will get the response from your allocated CDN. For example, if your Default Rule Set is trafficdirector.5centscdn.net and if you have assigned CDNetworks for your delivery, you can check your ruleset as illustrated in the below figure and make sure you have pointed to the right CDN.

If in case there occurs a degraded performance for your global delivery CDN, then ASN Filter and Country Filter comes in handy. For, e.g., if in case there happens a degradation for a particular ASN, then you can switch that specific ASN traffic to another CDN with ASN Filter.You can do the same for a location as well using the Country Filter tab. This will give rise to two scenarios which are explained below.

Scenario 1: Degraded performance in ASN

Let's say you have set your global delivery to StackPath, and if you feel that there is a degraded performance to a couple of IP’s, then you can switch the traffic for those IP’s with a different available CDN ( Limelight or CDNetwork )  by adding the corresponding ASN to it.

To implement this, click on the ASN Filter and add your ASN to the required, available CDN and toggle the button to ‘Enable.' Once you have made changes, please make sure to check your delivery from those IPs by taking a ping result to your rule set and confirm the changes you have done has been propagated.

Scenario 2: Degraded performance in a Country

This is similar to the first scenario, where you have a degraded performance for certain countries with your Global Delivery CDN.

Here, you can always switch your traffic to the desired CDN for the countries where you are facing the outages. To implement this, click on the Country Filter and add your ASN to the required, available CDN and toggle the button to ‘Enable.' Once you have made changes, you can verify the delivery by making a quick ping test from these countries and confirm the changes has been taken into effect.

What is HLS?

HLS is an abbreviation of HTTP Live Streaming.

HLS was originally developed by Apple to support only the iOS device to overcome the disadvantages of QuickTime Streaming Server. HLS then emerged as one of the reliable streaming platform and now becomes the default protocol for streaming.

Let's analyze market of smartphone OS:

Source: Gartner

From the above statistics, it is clear that Android is dominating the mobile world and Blackberry OS once regarded as one of the best is almost dead. Blackberry itself is developing its own Android phones because of the popularity of Android. The Android, iOS and Windows that can be streamed via HLS platform holds 99.5% of market share.  This is the primary reason behind why we chose HLS over other protocols.

HLS Advantages:

Adaptive Bitrate Protocol

HLS is an adaptive bitrate protocol which means the content is delivered according to the viewer’s connection capability. It will lessen buffering and other problems

    2.   Mobile Streaming

When considering the amount of internet traffic, mobile traffic plays a huge role, and it is improving day by day. If you want to use mobile for streaming, you need HLS.

    3.   Browser and OS support

HLS now supports all the major browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari and operating systems such as Android, iOS, Microsoft, Linux and MacOS

    4.   Easy to implement to any video player

It is very simple to embed your HLS stream to any video player. For instance, if you use JW player, all you need is to place the m38u reference URL into the video player code.

    5.   Adobe Flash Player Decline

New billing terms have been introduced.

Pre-Auth Payments

Starting February, we are adding Pre-Auth Payment for live streaming to our billing terms. As all our services are month to month basis as well as live event broadcaster are not sure how much BW they may use, to lower the initial cost and to secure payment pre-auth payments has been introduced. Now broadcaster can estimate the live event BW usage, and WebMobi Networks will be pre-authorizing the agreed amount and once the event is completed the amount will be charged on your credit card. For more information on pre-auth payment terms, contact our billing team at [email protected].

Grace Period

We always focus on every business opportunities that arise for our clients. Since India is the steadily growing business market in the Asian Continent, we thought of having an origin PoP there, and we are sure that it would definitely benefit our customers for any reason.

Now, we are glad that our dream comes true in the very first month of the year 2017 as our Indian Origin PoP in Chennai is Up and Running successfully.

Advantages of having Origin PoP in Chennai

1. Low latency to Indian clients

2. Improved performance and quality of service

3. Avoid fiber cuts on submarine routes like CHE - SG

4. High Availability

5. Direct private network to our Gateway servers in Europe

Enjoy Streaming with us!!!

We have compiled our Year in Review 2016. With this Campaign, we would like to thank all our customers for a great year and for the trust & support we have received throughout the year 2016.

Console Features

Brand New Console: We have launched a brand new console with a new look and feel in June 2016

Turbo boost Profiles: Boost your live stream performance in different geographical locations around the world with this feature.

Clean Slate purge tool: New purge tool called Clean Slate introduced with API and instant purging capabilities to purge your cached content.

SSL HTTPS Redirect: If you have a custom or shared SSL enabled on any of the CDN zones, and you decide to use HTTPS for content delivery from our CDN you can force to redirect all users just by clicking the toggle button.

HTTP/2: We have enabled HTTP2 for push and pull zone that guarantees even more security and performance to your content.

ABR in Restream: You can utilize this option to deliver the source restream into multiple resolution and bitrates. Previously this option is available only for Livestream and VOD.

Points of Presence

New PoPs in Madrid-Spain, Seoul - South Korea, Oslo - Norway, Stockholm - Sweden and Warsaw - Poland

On Demand PoPs in Bengaluru & Chennai - India, and Sao Paulo - Brazil

VOD PoPs in Australia, Singapore, and Brazil.

New Products Introduced

Cloud Storage: Cloud Storage Service is powered by OpenStack with prices starting from Rs 3 per GB and with features such as HTTP Chunk Upload, S3+swift compatible, Free uploads & API requests, etc

Managed Colocation:  5centsCDN introduced Managed Colocation Service that allows you to co-locate your servers within the WebMobi datacenter.

Basic iOS App for 50USD: 5centsCDN now builds basic iOS App with limited features for just 50USD. If you are innovative and have your own idea, you can write to our sales team at [email protected] for having a consultation with our iOS developer.

New MultiCDN Product: You can choose from top brand CDNs to deliver your content to various geographical locations across the world. Access to worldwide PoPs that include African PoPs too.

Updates in IPaaS (IPTV Platform as a Service)

Custom XML: Based on your custom requirements our development team customizes the XML structure to be compatible with your applications.

Pay Per View: Our IPaaS Middleware now comes with Pay Per View services. You can order movies, sporting events, and other entertainment videos for a fee via the interactive set-top-box or phone.

For most websites, one central server is the source for serving the content. It will be a fit if they target visitors on a single geographical location. But if they need to target other visitors, i.e., outside the country or continent, it will not be sufficient to serve the content from one primary server. The user will experience long load times due to the fact that the long distance the information has to travel. Here comes the Content Delivery Network that has a server in most of the geographical location in the world and serves the content from there.

The more the PoPs, the better your CDN is. 5centsCDN MultiCDN Delivery allows access to the best of the globe CDN in the market. The MultiCDN technology dynamically enhances and merges the range of CDN providers, their infrastructure to constantly, firmly and quickly accelerate web content in any part of the world.  

By integrating the CDN providers into an outstanding global network, you can utilize their strength and reach with automatic failover to superfluous networks in every region.

Features of MultiCDN

CDNs are selected on the basis of what will be fastest for the end user to reach. The content will be served from the fastest one if there are multiple providers found in the same region

We offer 100% uptime guarantee. If any of the CDN provider’s network goes down, it will be automatically switched to the next fastest network.

You will gain access to plenty of CDN locations which is impossible with an individual CDN provider.

CDN data centers can handle multiple requests than a single server. This helps to lighten the load on your primary server.

For more information and any queries related to MultiCDN, contact our sales team at [email protected]

Benefits

real-time routing based on isp performance

Easily load balance

What is HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is the updated version of the HTTP protocol. It is the much-awaited protocol and is the successor to HTTP/1.1. As the web changed a lot, it needs a better protocol than can reduce load times and improve the communication between web browsers and servers.

Origin of HTTP/2

SPDY is the protocol owned by Google and HTTP/2 was mostly based on SPDY. HTTP/2 has many similar features found in SPDY. SPDY already proved more concepts in HTTP/2.

Major Amendment in HTTP/2

Single TCP connection: A single TCP connection is used to load a website, and that connection is closed only when the site is closed. This improves the speed of your website.

Multiplexing: Requesting multiple files are allowed at the same time in a single connection. HTTP/1.1 on the other hand waits till the data transfer is completed.

Server Push: Server Push is the technique that allows the website load faster. It permits a web server to perform faster on the user request as the resources can be pushed from the web server before the request is made.

Priority in importance: High priority requests can be processed faster as the requests are assigned dependency levels.

Binary: Since HTTP/2 is a binary protocol no time is wasted in converting the text into binary language.

Compression: For every request made by the browser the header gets compressed before being sent which can reduce overhead. For every request in HTTP/1.1, many headers were sent with the same values.  

Note:

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome supports HTTP/2 only over a secure connection. As the majority of the web viewers using Mozilla and Google Chrome as their web browsers, they need to have a secure connection for their websites to support HTTP/2.

SSL Certificates are aimed at establishing secure connection between the web server and the web browser. SSL certificates are most commonly used for secure data transfer, bank transactions, logins etc.

Now, our secure system gets even better secured by enabling HTTPS for PUSH & PULL zone. Now you have the option to upload custom SSL certificates for your own CNAME along with our shared SSL service which is free of cost.

LOGIN to your Console and click the SSL/TLS button from your PUSH/PULL zone page to obtain the SSL page and follow the procedure below. (Refer Fig1)

1. The Zones and CNAME will be available by default.

2. Enable HTTP Access

If you would like to have both HTTP and HTTPS enabled, you need to select Enabled. Selecting Disabled will disable your HTTP access.

3. SSL 

Choose the Custom option to upload custom ssl certificates

4. Upload Custom Certificates

Incase if you don’t have the SSL certificate already, you can get the CSR file (mandatory for availing the SSL certificate from the service provider) by selecting I need the CSR file option instead of I have Certificate, you will get a form to fill out. After filling out the form, the CSR file is generated after clicking Get CSR button which can be downloaded then.

Fig1

5. And if you have a SSL Certificate with you, choose the I have certificate option , where you will be available with options for uploading the SSL certificate and the key file. (Refer Fig 2)

The key file will be generated once after uploading the SSL certificate which can then be uploaded as well. Our system will validate the Key file and deliver a confirmation message once it is acknowledged which makes you ensure that your system is secure now.

Fig 2