Cedexis Radar data consistently show that Edgecast is one of the best CDNs around, especially in North America and Asia where their availability and HTTP Response time scores put them in the top 3 or 4. However, no CDN is perfect everywhere and certainly not all the time. Edgecast in particular has had some recent intermittent trouble.

Cedexis Openmix customers who use Edgecast along with at least one other CDN avoided this outage. Openmix automatically detects outages and routes traffic to an alternative CDN. Here is a recent graph showing number of Openmix “decisions” for one of our customers who use Edgecast along with CDNetworks. This customer’s Openmix application is performance based – Openmix routes their web visitors to whichever CDN is fastest based on the ISPs from where those visitors come.

As you can see, in general this results on a slight preference for CDNetworks (this is all unique to each customer’s visitor profile, we have other customers for whom Edgecast gets most of the traffic). However, when the outage occurs, Edgecast decisions drop temporarily to nearly zero.

Interestingly, it appears that the timing of  Edgecast’s issues are specific to various ISPs and whichever node serves those ISPs. Here is a picture for the same Openmix customer and same time frame but showing decisions relevant to AT&T versus Qwest.

Instead of seeing an issue at 22:00 we see an issue at 11:00 the next day. This kind of per-ISP variability is exactly why we created Openmix.

Note: Openmix “decisions” refers to how many times, in the given time frame (in this case per hour) Openmix decided to route a customer to Edgecast versus CDNetworks. For example, at the start of the second graph at 15:00 hours 8,412 requests were resolved to CDNetworks and 7,983 requests were resolved to Edgecast based on whichever CDN was fastest (and available) at the moment Openmix received the DNS query.