Patent ID: 7441045

Claim:
A method of delivering content across a plurality of zones within a network, comprising: receiving a request from a client located within one of the plurality of zones for access to resources associated with a domain name; determining network conditions for the network based on a determination of the load for each of the plurality of zones; distributing the request to one of the plurality of zones based on the determined network conditions; selecting one of a plurality of servers within the zone in which the request was distributed, the selection of the server being based on a determination for optimally balancing the load across the plurality of servers; resolving an Internet protocol (IP) address of the selected server; and determining whether to delegate delivery of the resources to a content delivery network based on the determination for optimally balancing the load across the plurality of servers, a Time to Live value set at a pool level for each of a plurality of available pools, and a pool load-balancing setting; wherein selecting one of the plurality of servers further comprises: marking each of a plurality of pools to a not tried state, determining the pool load-balancing setting, selecting one of the plurality of pools that is marked to an initialization state, marking the selected one of the plurality of pools to a tried state, attempting to obtain an answer using the determined pool load-balancing on the selected one of the plurality of pools, and determining if the answer was obtained.