Can anyone tell me how a cdn works
 

Can any of you more experienced webmasters please explain to me in layman's terms how a cdn works, and how pricing plans work, etc. Can video be edited on he cdn?

You have to contact your phone company.

a CDN is a content delivery network. It takes your website, and replicates it on many machines all over the internet... usually the server is close to endpoints such as inside comcast's network. It makes content delivery quicker and more reliable for the enduser.

You cannot edit video on a CDN.

To the best of my understanding a CDN network has full data centers in key GEO locations and "edge cache" your content in many more locations. If someone from Australia has viewed a specific bit of content then the next person to view that same content will already have it cached in a location within Australia.

Yes you can update content and simply do a cache flush so the new content is pushed to the cache system.

One thing to watch if you are going to CDN is the way the company bill, some will charge you for bandwidth from origin server to cache and cache to end user, other companies only charge to the end user. The big issue with this is the ones that double dip will often have a shorter cache time like 30 days so you get double the bandwidth bill you would expect.

Hope this helped.

Kind of like when you play a video on Youtube it's not playing from the server the the original user uploaded it too but it's distributed to lots of servers around the world so when you play the video you don't have to stream from a server in say Europe or China or New York etc.

You didn't use a CDN when you worked at P-Hub?

Cdn
 

Nope, I never dealt with content until now. I wonder if I should put tube uploads on a cdn. I'll have to talk to some more people and find out some more first. Anyway I dont think my tubes are at that point yet but thanks a lot for the feedback!!!

Another bonus to having them on CDN is that now the CDN's servers are serving the videos for the most part. Your server is just giving the index page. Ideally the css and js, images, etc are all being served by the CDN.

Your server goes from a high load to a low load.