I have just setup my website as static page via Rackspace CDN / Akamai.
www.example.co.uk is an alias for d9771e6f24423091aebc-345678991111238fabcdef6114258d0e1.r61.cf3.rackcdn.com.
d9771e6f24423091aebc-345678991111238fabcdef6114258d0e1.r61.cf3.rackcdn.com is an alias for a61.rackcdn.com.
a61.rackcdn.com is an alias for a61.rackcdn.com.mdc.edgesuite.net.
a61.rackcdn.com.mdc.edgesuite.net is an alias for a63.dscg10.akamai.net.
a63.dscg10.akamai.net has address 63.166.98.41
a63.dscg10.akamai.net has address 63.166.98.40
a63.dscg10.akamai.net has IPv6 address 2001:428:4c02::cda8:ecb9
a63.dscg10.akamai.net has IPv6 address 2001:428:4c02::cda8:ed09
The HTTP header:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Last-Modified: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:27:41 GMT
ETag: fdf9e14b77def799e09e8ce815a521da
X-Timestamp: 1350689261.23382
Content-Type: text/html
X-Trans-Id: tx457979be3bd746c2b4e5403a1189cdbc
Cache-Control: public, max-age=900
Expires: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:18:56 GMT
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:03:56 GMT
Content-Length: 7124
Connection: keep-alive
I am wondering, if it's really the fastest solution to power the website? By investigating it thru http://www.just-ping.com/ it seems, that from many places the ping is very high, and during quick investigation I found that they use GeoIP to resolve addresses based on WHOIS, which is not accurate and because of that from many places the ping is above 300ms (for example, if ISP is in balgladore and request is routed to bangladore even if it's 300ms, for period of 1 month), while by just using Amazon Web Services and Route 53 Anycast DNS servers and only 4 EC2 instances it seems that for example India is always below 100ms, while using Akamai it goes above 300ms in some cases, and this is because Route 53 is using BGP.
By quickly checking the Akamai, it seems that they are not getting feedback from the traffic - the high ping stays constant even if I keep downloading large files and videos, which is opposite to what they say on their website. They state, that they optimize the performance by taking feedback from the requests, while it seems they just use GeoIP with per City resolution (which are mostly big cities).
Because of this, AWS with Route 53 / Anycast DNS seems to be much more reliable, as well EdgeCast which is using BGP, but I dont know how much does it cost to deploy static website. Actually, I dont know if EdgeCast is not a lie, because from isolated places there are many errors - so their performance is at the cost of quality of delivery, because of BGP switching the routes during transfer of large files.
So I was wondering, what is really Akamai good for, because they dont seem to pose any strength in any field in what I do understand now, except they offer some software based WAF on their website, but what I really care about is the core distribiution, so the question is?
Is really Akamai good for Videos?
For static websites?
???
I found so far AWS most usable with most consistent ping and stable transfers.
