A Content Distribution Network (CDN) can be defined as an overlay system that replicatescopies of contents at multiple points of a network, close to the final users, with theobjective of improving data access. CDN technology is widely used for the distribution oflarge-sized contents, like in video streaming. In this paper we address the problem offinding the best server for each customer request in CDNs, in order to minimize theoverall cost. We consider the problem as a transportation problem and a distributedalgorithm is proposed to solve it. The algorithm is composed of two independent phases: adistributed heuristic finds an initial solution that may be later improved by adistributed transportation simplex algorithm. It is compared with the sequential versionof the transportation simplex and with an auction-based distributed algorithm.Computational experiments carried out on a set of instances adapted from the literaturerevealed that our distributed approach has a performance similar or better to itssequential counterpart, in spite of not requiring global information about the contentsrequests. Moreover, the results also showed that the new method outperforms thebased-auction distributed algorithm.