Putting the “distributed” in CDN

I wrote yesterday that Google appeared to have taken the “distributed” out of their public CDN hosting of a variety of JavaScript libraries. I even provided some trace routes comparing their CDN to Microsoft’s. I was wrong.

Unlike James Collins, we don’t have terminal access to any servers in Australia. As I’ve detailed before, our sites are hosted in the US. James was kind and diligent enough to do some further testing comparing Microsoft’s CDN to Google’s. He found they resolved as follows:

Location Google Microsoft
Melbourne, AU US Sydney
Sydney, AU Sydney US
Perth, AU Sydney US

If you have the chance, I’d love you to test where ajax.aspnetcdn.com and ajax.googleapis.com resolve to for you. You can do a traceroute and you should be able to work out the destination from host names and response times. Letting me know via twitter is probably easiest, my username is @pwcc.

Obviously, I should have done all this checking before writing the post. By failing to do so, I look a bit of a tit.

By Peter Wilson

Peter has worked on the web for twenty years on everything from table based layouts in the 90s to enterprise grade CMS development. Peter’s a big fan of musical theatre and often encourages his industry colleagues to join him for a show or two in New York or in the West End.