Shotstack CDN - speed question

Shotstack API
1

Hello - we are based on the United States and I’m curious to know if the shotstack CDN is appropriate to use for our US traffic who will be seeing our videos. As of right now the URL we are using is as follows…
https://cdn.shotstack.io/au/stage/...........mp4

I notice that the URL contains “au” so I’m curious to know if that means the videos are being served from an AU data center or if this is truly using a global CDN and the video assets are distributed to local regions across the globe for faster speed times to US visitors.

I like the simplicity of using Shotstack CDN (vs trying to figure out how to setup S3 Bucket) but I’m questioning if by using Shotstack CDN I am sacrificing speed?

Second question - I notice it says “stage” in the URL - does that just mean that this is because I have not updated my templates from stage to production? Is there any significant difference between stage and production? Do the videos expire on stage? Are there speed differences on the serving of the videos? Just want to make sure I understand the difference.

Thank you in advance!

2

The origin is in Sydney, Australia so the first hit will be a bit slower than if the file was located in the US. However after that the file will be cached in a local edge server in the US and served from there. So yes it is a global CDN but the origin is currently Australia.

Also we use CloudFront for the CDN so the network requests go directly through Amazon global backbone network from the local edge location which basically makes the first request faster too.

Regarding stage, I think you have that correct. Any video created using the stage environment from the dashboard or template or render API endpoints will have stage in the URL. Once you switch to production the URL will have v1 in it.

There is no difference between stage and v1, they are identical. Right now videos do not expire from the stage or the v1 CDN. You can send delete requests to remove them however.