Host images on a CDN

Hi Greg,

Do you mean that you want to upload files from your local computer to CMSB, then have them served from your CDN when people visit your site?

If so, you'd just need to do two things: change CMSB's Upload Folder URL to reflect the CDN's base URL, and figure out how to get the files from CMSB to your CDN (that's the tricky part).

There are two ways I can think of getting this to work:

1. Set CMSB's Upload Directory to a directory you've set up to automatically sync with your CDN (for example, Dropbox could do this easily -- but I don't think it's intended to be used as a CDN.) With this approach, CMSB would put uploaded files into your special directory and a third-party process you've set up would upload them from there to your CDN. Jungle Disk might do the trick for Rackspace's Cloud Files, but I'm not entirely sure. You'd need to have the computer running CMSB also running this software at all times.

2. Develop a custom plugin which uploads files to your CDN using their API. With plugins, it's possible to run code when CMSB saves an uploaded file, so you could have some custom code upload new files to your CDN as they are created. This is something we could develop for you through our consulting service. Please let me know if you want us to look into a quote for you.

Hope this helps.

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your reply! I have contacted Ross for a quote.

Regards,

Greg

Hi Greg, 

Also, you might want to check out some other CDNs as well.  Some do all that for you automatically.  They just manage your DNS and automatically return cached images (*.jpg, *.gif, etc) and forward other requests and then you don't need to change anything.  (It can usually be configured what kinds of files are returned from the cache or not).

Any kind of CDN does add another layer of complexity though and can take some time to sort out unexpected issues.  We've worked with a number of them over the years on custom projects.

Cheers!

Hi Dave,

Thanks for adding your comments. Without endorsing any, can you tell me which other CDNs you are referring to please?

I have only looked at Rackspace CDN vs. Amazon Cloudfront.

I would be interested in researching other players.

Thank you,

Greg