It’s been a while since we last talked about Voxel Labs’s mod_cdn Apache module for easily interfacing an existing site with VoxCAST, so it’s definitely time for an update.

We’ve just released mod_cdn 1.1.0, which includes the following new features:
* Support for timestamp-based VoxCAST OnDemand token authentication
* Support for SSL-based sites
* Support for using the X-Forwarded-For header when computing authentication tokens

For current users of mod_cdn, you’ll definitely want to update your server to use this new version in order to take advantage of the new features. Note that existing installations of mod_cdn will require a slight change to the CDNHTMLToServer option in the module’s configuration, so check the included example.conf for more details.

We’re still looking into adding new features such as “intelligent switching” to allow users to have their site automagically use VoxCAST to prevent their server from ever being overwhelmed with requests. With such a feature, a site could easily protect itself from things such as the Slashdot and Digg Effects all without your having to do a thing!

If you’re currently using VoxCAST for your CDN needs and haven’t yet tried mod_cdn, it may be well worth your time to take a look. We’re always available day or night at support@voxel.net to help you with any issues you may encounter, and, of course, we love receiving feature requests for ideas you may have for future releases.

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Voxel’s new open source Apache web server module allows customers to seamlessly offload rich media content from hosted infrastructure onto the VoxCAST CDN

For Immediate Release

NEW YORK/EWORLDWIRE/Sep 16, 2008 — Voxel dot Net Inc. today announced that it will offer fully-integrated, premium on-demand content delivery network (CDN) services as part of its standard hosting offering – at no extra charge. Branding this new innovation as Universal Transfer, Voxel becomes the first hosting company to allow its clients to mix and match their high bandwidth needs between dedicated servers and a CDN. For new and existing hosting clients, Voxel believes this will dramatically simplify the decision-making process regarding current and future capacity needs.

Starting today, companies who know they need hosting – but still may not know when or if they may need a CDN – can benefit from flexible customized contracts, transparent pricing, and the ease of working with the experienced and professional team of engineers at Voxel.

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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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