Patent ID: 8527639

Claim:
A method for identifying content servers for providing content to clients, comprising: transmitting messages from content servers in a content distribution network (CDN) to Domain Name System (DNS) proxies; receiving, at the content servers, responses from the DNS proxies that include network service data indicating a service distance between a respective content server and a respective DNS proxy; feeding the network service data from the content servers to at least one routing server; receiving, at a first DNS proxy, a request from a first client for an Internet Protocol (IP) address of a content server to provide content to the first client; receiving, at the routing server, a request from the first DNS proxy for an identification one or more content servers to provide content to the first client that contacted the first DNS proxy; based on the data received from the content servers, determining at the routing server one or more content servers in the CDN that are best-suited for providing content to the first client; and returning a set of one or more selections of content servers to the first DNS proxy for use by the first DNS proxy to respond to the request from the first client, wherein each selection is associated with a time-to-live (TTL) and wherein the time length of the TTLs is based on a confidence of the routing server in the set of selections.