LeaseWeb

Lease Web! I’m just going to assume that you’re peddling smut. If you’re this deep down the CDN rabbit hole, you’re probably peddling smut. I haven’t heard of a porn reviewer or a forum host being curious about content delivery before. CDNs are mostly used in the digital porn industry to move animated titties from one location to another. Conventionally, you’ll be moving titties from your website to a ton of end-users or should I say fappers. The whole point to having a CDN is that you don’t end up streaming all of your various smut videos to your fappers directly. Instead, you hedge that shit through an international network of servers. These servers cache the data as needed so that they can redistribute it to wherever it needs to go.

Don’t worry; they’re not stealing your smut. It’s an integrated network that’s tied straight to your website. As far as your users are concerned, they’re still receiving all of their smut straight from you. Your average successful porn website operates in this way and you’ve probably never noticed. Now, you might be thinking that this sounds kind of complicated to set up. Well, it is. Doing it manually is not out of the question, but it’s pointless on account of how much money it would cost. That’s where LeaseWeb comes in. They’ve already got the servers in various locations around the world and they’re leasing them to you. Get it? It’s in the name.

They’re far from the only CDN available to you. A lot of these services are extremely popular. The market’s wide enough to make room for all of them to coexist in harmony. Granted, Amazon kind of holds the monopoly on serious business, but they’re also pretty expensive. LeaseWeb might be a better option if you’re just starting out. But first, we’ll need to get into some specifics.

Their Server Coverage

There are a couple of ways for you to choose your coverage with LeaseWeb, but their total network seems to be comprised of just over 300 servers across the globe. They’ve got one on every continent that matters – so, not Antarctica. Other than that, they pretty much cover the spread. Now, you don’t get direct access to these servers, at least with the default package. Instead, the content just gets distributed automatically through their network to wherever it needs to go. People that run VPNs will naturally get a shittier service on account of the added mileage, but that’s their problem. LeaseWeb appears to have all the required bells and whistles to be a perfectly reputable CDN.

They do have a few claims on their site that I don’t really like. They claim that they have unmatched capacity. Apparently, they can handle any spike using up to 9 global CDNs. They even mention that they support peer-to-peer delivery. That’s… interesting, but it’s not a boast. It’s fluff. Besides, they do not have unmatched capacity – AWS does. I know that it’s hard for these kinds of smaller CDNs to compete against the big monopolies, but they don’t have to fluff it up. What makes LeaseWeb appealing isn’t the server coverage; it’s the cost. At least, in theory. If you’re not using AWS, the main reason is always either the cost or the fact that they don’t support your niche.

Tons of Standard Security Features

In the same vein as their unmatched capacity boast, they’ve got a lot of features listed on their home page that are just par for the course. I’m not surprised they offer these features – I’d be surprised if they didn’t. This is all standard stuff for a proper CDN. Still, I’d like to cover it because you should be informed of what you’re getting yourself into.

When it comes to security, you’re looking at complete custom SSL certificate coverage with access control. That means that you can opt-out of certain delivery chains if certain places of the world are giving you problems. This is perfect in case you’re delivering smut that is unacceptable in some regions of the world. Granted, you could probably just opt out of those places server-side, meaning, prevent your website from being accessible there, but doing that through your CDN is perhaps wiser. If you don’t want your content to be accessible in a given geographic region, pull the trigger.

There’s also some content protection in the form of hotlinking prevention, to basically forbid people from accessing the hosted files directly once a cached version becomes available. This works to protect you from unnecessary access and theft and it protects the end-user from looking like an idiot. They should be sharing the destination link. That is, they should be sharing your actual website, not the links to the videos. If you offer video downloads, this part is crucial. In layman’s terms, you don’t want people to be able to right-click and save your videos or copy a link to them and share it with someone else. You want everyone to get the content directly from your website.

LeaseWeb has another layer of protection against this same flavor of bullshit, with token authentication for anyone who makes a content request on your website. Again, in layman’s terms, this means that the content only becomes available to the person who requests it from your site. External sources can’t scrape into your content, even if it’s public. Third parties also can’t piggyback on someone else’s request.

Reporting Tools

Ok, this part I find a bit confusing because I don’t usually depend on my CDN for analytics and neither should you. Also, I don’t want you to get it twisted – the reporting tools that LeaseWeb offers are very narrowly designed to give you insight into CDN usage. They’re not here to be used as marketing tools. Yes, there are technically ways you can spin this data to get some usage metrics about specific geographical locations, but that’s not what these tools are here for.

Instead, you’re mostly supposed to see where your bandwidth is going so you can crunch the numbers. Depending on your package, you might not want to pipe content everywhere for free, especially if certain places worldwide are becoming a useless drain on resources. You can put a cork in it and dial down delivery to these places or just outright ban them from your site. Save the ban hammer for extreme cases, though.

LeaseWeb also notes that their platform is great for discovering trends. At this point, they’re straight up offering you marketing advice. I’m lukewarm on this. I don’t see the connection between my CDN and my marketing efforts. It’s nice that they’re throwing it in for free, but is it going to pad my price? I’d rather get a premium marketing package from a marketing company.

Proper Support

LeaseWeb comes with 24/7 support for any hiccups along the way. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any problems with your CDN once you’re up and running, but this world is far from ideal. There will be a fuck-up eventually and you want to know that it’ll be handled immediately. The funny thing is, when you’re first starting out, CDN crap-ups are unlikely. But, that’s when you care the least, technically. A video being inaccessible isn’t such a big deal when it means that one visitor may have a problem with it. It’s exponentially worse when you’ve got thousands of hits ending with a 404 every few minutes or so. That shit could really break your reputation.

I know people that straight up abandon websites when they see them having issues more than once in the same day. They’ll remove that bookmark and toss you aside like yesterday’s cum sock. Don’t let that happen. Use LeaseWeb’s support the second you see a problem.

Odd Reviews

LeaseWeb has a bunch of contradicting reviews that don’t really make a lot of sense to me. There are a lot of users that claim that their contract was terminated because they were allegedly doing shady shit. Then, there are those who claim that they reported a LeaseWeb hosted website for doing shady shit and nothing was done about this.

Someone’s got to be lying here. I’ll understand if LeaseWeb terminates your contract if you do something illegal. That makes sense; every CDN would do that. But, how can they be too lax and too strict at the exact same time? They’re supposed to have 24/7 support. Surely, the support can help you figure out any of these issues instantly, right? They don’t make their pricing visible on the site, so I can’t really give you an estimate as to how worthwhile this service is. You’ll have to contact them, unfortunately. That being said, try to get a trial period or maybe only pay for a month in advance, so you’re not on the hook for a CDN solution you’re not happy with. Test the waters and decide whether they’re the right fit for you.