NetDNA Blog

We know it has been awhile since our last control panel updates were released, but we wanted to make this one a good one and come out with some ground breaking industry features that will make the NetDNA experience a memorable one. As with all our new features each was requested by our customers, and each adds a new level of flexibility and personal account management control.

New Control Panel Features:

File Manager 1.0: As the number one most requested feature from our media streaming clients our development team has created a new file management system accessible on all VOD Zones under the Assets sub tab. The new File Manager will allow you to easily copy and paste simple streaming video embed code for each of your video files utilizing Flowplayer with some skin customization, or by clicking the Other Players tab you will be able to copy and paste the code necessary to work with any flash based video player. Note that customers will still need to upload thier videos through FTP and SFTP.

Live Zone Provisioning: As a commonly requested feature for our video streaming clients direct from our media server partner Wowza Media Systems, it is now possible to provision a Live streaming zone in real-time. After payment of the $99 one-time setup fee and $150 per month minimum viewer hours fee the zone will be 100% active and ready for use. Any viewer hour overages will be billed the following month on the zone creation anniversary date. Newly created Live Zones are compatible with any Flash based RTMP or RTSP media encoder including Adobe Media Encoder Live or Wirecast, both of which we highly recommend.

Enable/Disable Robots.txt: Customers can now use a new Pull Zone feature to enable and disable the creation of a robots.txt file that they can also customize through the Control Panel. This feature will help the content to be considered as original and not duplicate as it will not allow the search engines to crawl the cached content on our edge servers. Thus it reduces the risk of existing SEO rankings being affected. This feature can be found under the Manage section of the Pull Zones dashboard page under Advanced Settings.

Set Default Cache Time: Under the Advanced Settings tab of the Pull Zone management settings, customers can now set a custom static file cache time By default our system will set a default cache time of 24 hours (1 day) for the max amount of time a static file will remain on our edge servers before we attempt to re-cache the content from the origin server. The new control feature allows each zone to have independent settings allowing the default cache time to be set to 1 day, 7 days, 1 Month and 12 Months.

Override Cache-Control Header: Under the Advanced Settings tab of the Pull Zone management settings, customers can now set whether they would like us to override the default cache-control headers that are sent from their origin server. This new setting is an override on the browser level for the max amount of time to cache a static file. Options for Max-Age browser value include No Override (Default), 1 day, 7 days, 1 Month and 12 Months.

Control Panel Improvements:

New Contact Us Form: Because we are very eager to hear what you think we have created a new contract us form that give you the option to submit an email ticket to one of four departments. Bugs will go direct to our development department, feedback will go direct to our management team, support and sales will go to their respective departments. We encourage all of our existing customers and potential new customers to contact us at anytime, beside the contract form for existing customer use, potential customers can contact us via email, live chat and telephone 24/7/365.

Column Sorting: It is now possible to sort zone information and customer information without having to reload the control panel page. This small but mighty feature should allow for a more pleasurable user experience.

If you have any questions or feedback of any kind please contact us!