Archive for the ‘News’ Category
NetDNA Servers upgraded with Solid State Drives (SSDs)
Friday, July 30th, 2010We have upgraded all our servers (Pull Zone and Push Zone servers) from the normal Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to blazing fast Solid State Drive (SDD). By introducing the latest SSD technology into our network architecture we have successfully reduced our network latency by providing high-speed disk Input/Output capabilities, allowing us to deliver data and files faster.
SSDs are very different compared to the traditional hard disk drives in terms of how they write or retrieve data on microchips.
Advantages of SSD’s:
- There are no moving heads or spinning disks which results in faster random access of data because there is no “Seeking Motion” as required in HDD’s
- Consistent read performance because physical location of data is irrelevant for SSDs.
- Lack of moving parts provides higher mechanical reliability, lower power consumption and emits less heat than HDD’s.
SSD’s in the servers will allow customers to have faster file operations, ultimately speeding up our Content Delivery Solutions even further. With NetDNA you can always be assured that we will be quick to react to new technology changes and always pass on any network architecture savings and benefits back to our loyal customers.
NetDNA.com Selects Wowza as its Premiere Media Server Partner for HDDN.com Video CDN
Monday, July 19th, 2010
NetDNA.com has teamed up with Wowza Media Systems®, the media server software company, to serve all of its audio and video streaming content through the Wowza Media Server® 2 platform. By taking advantage of Wowza’s unified delivery platform it allows our brand HDDN.com to make a major impact in the media streaming market without having to invest in multiple delivery platform licenses and management requirements.
With this partnership, we plan to offer the most affordable and easiest to use video and audio delivery platform around the globe. With the launch of HDDN.com video-focused brand, we have taken a giant leap into the streaming media market by offering high quality, competitively priced packages to serve high definition content through its dedicated high-speed distribution network. Because of how versatile each Wowza Media Server is, it allows us to take advantage of its full content delivery footprint around the globe utilizing the NetDNA Anycast DNS network for intelligent packet routing as well as integration between the Wowza API and the custom NetDNA API for improved customer implementation and setup.
About Wowza Media Systems
Wowza Media Systems is the media server software company that provides an industrial strength infrastructure for live video, video-on-demand, live recording and video chat. For more information, visit Wowza Media Systems at www.wowzamedia.com.
Control Panel 1.8 Released
Thursday, July 15th, 2010Today we proudly released version 1.8 of our Control Panel!
The improvements in this release allow us to be even more flexible then we where before.
New Features:
Custom Domains: From now on you are able to have 7 Custom Domains per Pull or Push Zone. On request we can provide you as many Custom Domains as you need.
Wildcards for Custom Domains: We developed a way to enable wild cards for on Custom Domains, to help you to integrate your project even easier with our Content Delivery Network.
Content Disposition: Using this new feature, you can force a zone to have all files in it automatically downloaded (such as movies that the user should download and not stream). When enabled the Content Disposition Feature will set the modify the http header and force all files to behave as if the end-user chose the save as dialog. You will find this feature under the Advanced Zone Settings.
Automatic Secure Token Setup: It allows you to Setup a Secure VOD Zone just as easy as a normal Video on Demand Zone. This feature is only available on our Video Solution HDDN.com.
Bug Fixes:
UI issue on the popular files export report.
If you have any questions or feedback of any kind please contact us.
Control Panel 1.4.1 Release
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010What’s new?:
1. Updated API Documentation (in the Support section)
2. Some customers reported slowness in our control panel after the 1.4 release. We’ve made some changes to prevent these issues.
– optimized slow queries for the following methods (14 seconds was reduced to around 2 seconds) for the “Most Popular Files” graphs and widgets
– added client side caching for minified js and css files
Don’t hesitate to share any feedback with us.
A special thanks to Bryan, Billy and Steve for this release.
Control Panel 1.4 Release
Friday, April 2nd, 2010Control Panel version 1.4 has been released over the past week. All customers are fully upgraded to the new code:
- Activity Viewer: Latest control panel activity viewer.
- Video Debugger: See videos per PoP
- Default Compression File types changed: Added “Application/Javascript” to the default Pull Zone compression list.
Full list:
- Fixed occasional zend error message showing up at the bottom when creating a push/vod zone
- Fixed push zone renaming to properly update dns
- Added Last Activity
- New Service Updates layout (lists last 5 updates)
- New button style and some minor css enhancements
- Some UI theme refinements
- New VOD debug tool
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on pull zone list
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage pull zone
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on push zone list
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage push zone
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on vod zone list
- Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage vod zone
- Refactored passwordmeter.js into a jquery plugin to support multiple password meters on one page
- Updated all templates with password meters to use the jquery plugin
- Added Live Zone listing and portal page
- Css/Js minification for speed increases on the control panel
- added “View all reports” button icon on zone portal
- added “View all reports” button icon on dashboard reports widget
- Completed the Edit API key section
- Toggle on/off compression on pull zone portal
- In-place ajax-loader icon
- took out the depency on jquery.blockUI plugin and created a custom ajax notifier plugin with the help of jquerytools which is easier to configure. This one easily supports ajax loading icons and custom messages.
- updated all ajax notifiers on these pages
- added ajax icon while loading rss feeds
- added min-height on files list on dashboard and manage pages so files tab won’t be smaller when there are no files to list
- moved today’s transfer to a new column on Zone listing pages
- made totals row height bigger on pull/push/vod lists
- removed origin url column on pull zone
- added success/provisioning error messages for:
- Pull Zone basic info update
- Pull Zone custom domain update
- Push Zone basic info update
- Push Zone custom domain update
- VOD Zone update
- fixed javascript in adding of custom domains in pull zones and push zones
- added external link icon for external links under pull zone and push zone listing
- Updated content-type list for compression to include “Application/Javascript”
Enjoy! Please contact us with any feedback.
Control Panel 1.3 Updates
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Featured Updates:
Today, the Control Panel v1.3 is released. Among the new features:
- Multi Hostname in Pull Zones – as directed by yslow, we now allow easy addition hostnames on the same Pull Zone.
- Reporting Updates – added a reporting dashboard, more links to Zone stats
- New FAQs – We’ve started a new wiki for FAQs that we will
- U/I Refinements – added inline editing, VOD Portal Page, Push Zone Portal Page
- More:- Bug fixes and Improvements (listed below)
Multi Hostname in Pull & Push Zones
According to Yahoo’s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website”, splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you’re using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org
For more information check “Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane” by Tenni Theurer and Patty Chi.
Here is a screenshot of the new feature in your control panel. To get to this, click on any Pull Zone you’ve created from the Dashboard:
Reporting Updates
There is a new reporting dashboard that gives you an overview of all your zones, or an individual zone by any date range. Here is a screenshot of the new Reporting Dashboard:
Also available on the Main dashboard is a button for “reports” which allows you to jump right into a customized reporting dashboard for each individual zone:
There are a series of U/I refinements, particularly in and around managing individual Pull Zones and VOD Zones. There are now more clear instructions on how to connect, zone specific stats and a spot to manage multiple CNames (as mentioned above). Here is a screenshot of the Manage Pull Zone page:
FAQs:
We’ve launched a new FAQs section.
To get to it, click on “Support” from the main navigation in your control panel.
Please feel free to post any FAQs in the comments of this blog, and we will ad them.
Full Lists of fixes and improvements:
* Reporting page to be reformatted to have graphs again
* Edit Pull Zone Redesign (Added inline edits)
* VOD Zone Creation Instructions Update (added more info popup)
* Better Error Messaging on Pull Zone Creation
* All zone names must be 16char or less
* U/I Changes – remove multicolored “Push” “Pull”, etc buttons from the main listings
* Navigation now only has the current headings options
* Put more instructions in Push Bucket Help (added more info popup)
* Put in new FAQs
* Removed the text “Navigation Menu” from the top left menu
* Made rows clickable on zone lists
* Better graphs (now shows more accurate stats and “knows” days with 0 data)
* Added failed login email sending
* Show invited users
* Add Push Zone and VOD Zone “Portal” Pages
* Live Zone Stats
Version 1.3 couldn’t have been done with out your feedback. Please keep it coming and we will do our best to get your feature requests into version 1.4.
Cheers!
Control Panel 1.1.4 Update
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010Bug Fixes:
- Fixed sorting by hits in Dashboard U/I
- Fixed the Zend Error on Unique IP per day report
- Fixed the display of Service Updates
Improvements:
- Fixed Side Bar Navigation
- Moved API ID to its own column
- Changed A record string to CNAME record string
- If a password change fails it now displays reason
- Added Password strength meter to all locations requiring a password
- Made the images for different zone types on dashboard all the same size
- Added version string to the footer
- Changed the file listing for popular files to the new U/I style
- Removed all instances of Origin IP from the Control Panel. Instead a warning will be displayed if the origin IP differs from what we have on file asking you to change it.
Control Panel 1.1.3 Update
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Bug Fixes:
- Fixed issue that caused origin IP to show as 0.0.0.0 on Zone info
- Fixed issue where Javascript errored on dashboard when zones table is empty
- Fixed issue that caused a fatal error to be displayed when adding a user with an email that was already in the database
Improvements:
- Additional logging added for fatal errors
- Made sure that the lost password function did not appear to work for accounts that were not there
- Added additional content when user activates your account
Partial Outage
Friday, December 18th, 2009Some customers may have noticed a partial outage between 5:40PM PST and 5:46PM PST. This was due to a routing issue with our upstream which has been rectified.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Follow up to 1.1 – Release 1.1.1
Thursday, December 17th, 2009We’re following up with a few small fixes and updates from last night’s release. Enjoy!
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed CSS Bugs
- Fixed issue with display emails when none had been sent
- Fixed issue with Service Updates not showing “-” correctly
- Added note that we no longer support directly purging, we purge entire cache.
- Fixed errors with table headers for reports
- Fixed invite user Agreement URL
- Fixed issue with Cities Graph when large values were used
Improvements:
- Changed default caching time to 24hrs
- Changed some text for Payments
- Added a “Buy Button” to the main account page