Been doing some research on the issue and finding out anything on this nyud.net thing is kind of difficult, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
In any case, here is some of what I've found:
The Coral Content Distribution NetworkOur Goal
Are you tired of clicking on some link from a web portal, only to find that the website is temporarily off-line because thousands or millions of other users are also trying to access it? Does your network have a really low-bandwidth connection, such that everyone, even accessing the same web pages, suffers from slow downloads? Have you ever run a website, only to find that suddenly you get hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server and possibly causing high monthly bills? If so, CoralCDN might be your free solution for these problems!
Using Coral
Taking advantage of CoralCDN is simple. Just append
.nyud.net
to the hostname of any URL, and your request for that URL is handled by Coral! Try this page, or any other site:
A free content delivery network for your domainCoral CDN is a free peer-to-peer like CDN. It has a huge network, with over 260 servers world wide it?s larger than most commercial CDNs. Using Coral CDN is as easy as appending .nyud.net to the hostname of any url and that request will be served by the Coral CDN. So if you had image on your site like so:
<img src=?/images/some_large_image.jpg? />
It would become:
[img width= height=]http://www.example.com.nyud.net/images/some_large_image.jpg[/img]
Just for fun the image of the map is being served from in this way. For a site that features many large images or other static content using Coral can save tons of bandwidth and the request will be served from the closest server has the content in its cache. Unfortunately because of the volunteer nature of the system only the most popular content is widely distributed so often loading something from Coral actually takes longer than the origin server. Running a few tests with webpagetest.org shows that web pages from Coral CDN can take as much as twice as long to load. (test of nnucomputerwhiz.com vs test of nnucomputerwhiz.com.nyud.net)
Coral has other downsides besides speed since it is basically a proxy f0r any website many content filters and security software block the nyud.net domain rendering anything served using Corel inaccessibly. So some users that are behind a company firewall might just see broken jpegs.
Pros:
Just requires changing url
Save on bandwidth and server load
Cons:
Can be slow {...this we know!!!}
Restricted by content filters and security software
