Troubleshooting - CDN Side

You may wonder why “Server Uptime” is the only item on the list for this area. The reason is simply that your streaming service provider simply “mirrors” the live-stream signal it receives from your encoder. It usually does not change the format, resolution, quality, codec of the stream, but simply makes it available to a multitude of concurrent viewers. Therefore the uptime of the streaming servers is your CDNs foremost responsibility and focus.

If the streaming servers go down, your stream will be down – entirely. There is no “grey zone”. Your live-stream is either up or it isn’t if your streaming provider’s servers are down. It is therefore crucial not to use a single-point streaming provider, but a multi-site CDN (Content Delivery Network), which is a cloud-server-network with multiple server locations. The redundancies within a CDN ensure the highest possible level of uptime guarantee. The more server locations a CDN provides (AKA “nodes”), the lower the risk for a network-wide “meltdown”.

There are generally two types of CDNs (“streaming-cloud-networks”): regional CDNs and global CDNs. Regional CDNs have multiple server locations within a region (country or continent), with up to 5 locations (nodes) usually. Global CDNs are larger with usually more than 10 locations (nodes) distributed around the globe for increased stability and performance. The probability of a server-side downtime is close to zero if you are using a global CDN.