Something we have a lot of experience with at this point is helping VoxCAST customers modify their websites to take advantage of the CDN’s static content delivery. Depending on how forward-thinking a customer was when they first built their site, the process can be as simple as switching a DNS entry. Typically, though, it’s more like:

1. Look through the HTML, PHP, Ruby, Python, or whatever else for links to static content;
2. Painstakingly edit the code to re-point those links to a new hostname, like cdn.example.com;
3. Potentially (depending on the application) relocate all the actual content to a different origin server (for some of our customers with TB of data, this has taken weeks); and
4. Finally, turn on the CDN, point cdn.example.com at it, and hope you didn’t miss anything important.

In other words, turning up a CDN to serve your content can be a lot of work if you weren’t planning on it from the start.

Well, like all good engineers, at Voxel Labs we’re lazy. We don’t like to waste time doing boring stuff like poking through code looking for links to replace, and we’re pretty sure our customers share the sentiment. So we came up with mod_cdn, an Apache module that makes CDN-ifying a site ridiculously easy.

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