Voxel Offers Pre-Paid CDN Model

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, April 25. 2008 at 04:00 PM EDT Post a comment

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Voxel Dot Net Inc. says it is going after Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s S3 storage service customers and is attempting to disrupt current content delivery pricing models, by offering pre-paid CDN services aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The company, which started out as a managed hosting provider, recently jumped into the content delivery racket and has signed up a number of celebrity- and politics-related blog customers. But now it's looking to expand with service offerings aimed at customers of Amazon.com's S3 and other small customers looking for an entry-level CDN provider.

First, the company is looking to grab users of the S3 service by offering content distribution services at prices that match Amazon's published pricing, as long as those customers spend at least $500 per month.

CEO Raj Dutt says the service offering helps customers that use S3 for both storage and content delivery. By integrating its services with S3 application programming interfaces (APIs), Voxel says it can offer S3 customers higher-quality content delivery at the same cost they would get with Amazon's service.

According to Dutt, the company is also trying to be more price transparent, with CDN prices that follow a pre-paid model. The new pricing model will allow a customer to buy a certain amount of bandwidth without having to worry about monthly commitments.

"We're offering people the ability to buy 2 terabytes, 20 terabytes, 200 terabytes, or even 2 petabytes right off the Website without signing any sort of contract. They'll be able to blow through that over whatever time they want," Dutt says.

Dutt says the pricing model will enable small and medium-sized business that want a CDN but don't want to go through the process of trialing services and negotiating contracts when they won't know how much bandwidth they'll need.