Method and system for tiered distribution in a content delivery network

A method operative in a content delivery network having a set of surrogate origin servers organized into regions and that provide content delivery on behalf of participating content providers, wherein a given content provider operates an origin server, comprising:

• establishing a cache hierarchy in the CDN comprising a given surrogate origin server region and one of:
• (a) a single parent region, and (b) a subset of the parent server regions;
• in response to a determination that a given object request cannot be serviced in the given surrogate origin server region, attempting to service the request from a peer in the given surrogate origin server region;
• if the request cannot be serviced from a peer in the given surrogate origin server region, providing the given object request to the single parent region or to a given one of the subset of parent regions instead of to an origin server, wherein the providing step is based on content provider-specific metadata associated with the given object request and includes the sub-steps of rewriting a first data string associated with the given object request into a second data string that points to the cache hierarchy and resolving the second data string, wherein if the directing step directs the given object request to one of the subset of parent regions, the second data string is resolved to identify a best core region and an optimal server in the best core region to service the given object request;
• and
• attempting to service the given object request in the single parent region or the given one of the subset of parent regions as determined by the providing step.