Patent ID: 7149797

Claim:
A method operative in a content delivery network (CDN), the CDN deployed, operated and managed by a content network delivery service provider (CDNSP) and comprising a set of content servers organized into regions and having a Domain Name System (DNS) request handling mechanism associated with a CDN namespace, comprising: having the CDNSP establish a private-labeled content delivery network within a portion of the CDN, the private-labeled content delivery network associated with a network service provider (NSP) and comprising a subset of the content servers operated by the CDNSP, the private-labeled content delivery network further including a private-labeled CDN namespace associated therewith that is a subset of the CDN namespace, wherein the private-labeled content delivery network enables the NSP to provide content delivery to participating content providers without requiring the NSP to deploy, operate and manage content servers in its network, wherein the NSP also obtains a given benefit from the CDNSP in exchange for offering the private-labeled content delivery network; resolving a request for content associated with the private-labeled CDN namespace to identify one of the content servers in the private-labeled content delivery network and attempting to serve the content from the one of the identified content server in the private-labeled content delivery network; and if load on the private-labeled content delivery network exceeds a given threshold, resolving an additional request for content associated with the private-labeled CDN namespace to identify one of the content servers external to the private-labeled content delivery network and attempting to serve the content from the one of the identified content server external to the private-labeled content delivery network; wherein the requests for content associated with the private-labeled CDN namespace are processed by the DNS request handling mechanism associated with the CDN namespace; wherein the given benefit is a reduction in a rate paid by the NSP for off-net content delivery; and wherein the reduction is provided in exchange for the NSP reducing a rate charged to the CDNSP for bandwidth in the NSP's network.