Do any CDN services offer multiple urls (or aliases) for your files?
- by Jakobud
Lets say a company has multiple commercial web properties that happen to use a lot of the same images on each site. For SEO reasons, the sites must not appear to be related to eachother in any way. This means that the sites can't all link to the same image, even though they all use the same one. Therefore, an image is uploaded to each site and served from each site separately.
In order to improve maintainability and latency, lets say the company wanted to use a CDN service.
What I'm wondering is, if you upload a file, like an image or something, to a CDN, is there basically one single URL that you access that image at? Or do some (or all) CDN services offer alias URLs so that you can access the same resource from multiple URLs?
Example of undesirable situation: Both sites link to the same file URL
Site ABC links to
<img src="http://123.cdnservice.com/some-path/myimage.jpg"/>
Site XYZ links to
<img src="http://123.cdnservice.com/some-path/myimage.jpg"/>
Example of DESIRABLE situation: Both sites link to the same file via different URLs
Site ABC links to
<img src="http://123.cdnservice.com/some-path/myimage.jpg"/>
Site XYZ links to
<img src="http://123.cdnservice.com/some-alias-path/myimage.jpg"/>
So in the end, there is only one single file, myimage.jpg on the CDN server, but it is accessible from multiple URLs. Is this possible with CDN services?
I know this would make browsers cache the same image twice, but at least it would be better for maintainability. Only one file would ever have to be uploaded.
