Akamai operates one of the largest CDN (Content Delivery Network) networks in the world. And if you are not aware, Facebook is one of Akamai’s biggest customers. Most, if not all of the media files that you upload in Facebook are stored on servers operated by Akamai. Now, how does that relate to this article on a free CDN? Continue reading…
Two weeks back, I wrote an article on viewing private album photos in Facebook. In that article, I mentioned that all picture files uploaded in Facebook have a direct URL link that can be accessed by anyone. We will need to exploit this loophole to use Akamai to host our media files. Note that this will only work for static image files in JPEG format. CSS or Javascript files cannot be hosted in this manner.
Firstly, create a private album in Facebook for each website or blog that you have. A public album will also do, but a private album means that your friends on Facebook will not be spammed with all the pictures that you are going to upload to that album.
Whenever you need to display an image on your website, upload that image file to the Facebook album that you created earlier. Do a right click on the image file and copy the image URL. Use this URL on your website to link to the image.
Below is a picture that I have uploaded to one of my Facebook albums and it should be served by Akamai instead of my web host!
In a similar fashion, I believe video files can also be hosted in this way. But I have not come across an easy way to get the URL of video files uploaded on Facebook yet.
Mohamed Ibrahim
ibrahim = { interested_in(unix, linux, android, open_source, reverse_engineering); coding(c, shell, php, python, java, javascript, nodejs, react); plays_on(xbox, ps4); linux_desktop_user(true); }
