Make your customers happy with short Web page load times, reliable service and high-quality audio and video downloads. One of the many benefits of the Edge Caching content delivery network is it accelerates your content delivery, giving your customers the high level of service they expect.
Edge Caching is a group of servers strategically deployed in Hostway's multiple data centers in four continents, including North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Together, the servers determine the fastest route to speed your data to end-users. The Web objects are retrieved in parallel with Hostway's patent-pending technology.
A content delivery network enhances the user experience in three important ways:
With Edge Caching, data is never far away from the viewer. It is a cost-effective way to quickly deliver large media files anywhere in the world while ensuring your Web site's availability.
You need to deliver your Web site content quickly to thrive in today's online marketplace. Customers won't wait for more than a few seconds for your Web site to load before clicking away to another site.
Hostway's Edge Caching content delivery network (CDN) improves your user experience with shorter load times, high-quality video and audio downloads and increased reliability.
Your business will enjoy:
Hostway's content delivery network is built on multiple patent-pending technologies and a worldwide system of data centers to provide unparalleled service. Edge Caching will increase your Web site's performance with:
To learn more about Edge Caching, just follow the links below, or call 1-888-874-1875 to find out how we can create an Edge Caching solution tailored to your needs.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers deployed across a large geographic area that operate together to deliver content to end-users via the Internet. The nodes on the CDN work together to quickly and efficiently satisfy end-user requests for the Internet-based content.
Hostway currently manages multiple data centers worldwide, providing a strong global footprint for our CDN product: Edge Caching. When a site visitor downloads content from a Web site, the Edge Caching servers select the best location and work in parallel to deliver the content from our multiple cache servers. This method, called parallel retrieval, allows Hostway to utilize multiple Edge Caching servers to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to deliver the content.
Hostway’s Edge Caching solution is based on multiple patent-pending technologies. Our distributed multiple name servers select the best server location for content distribution based on: end user location, network status and other pertinent information.
Hostway measures the network speed from tens of thousands of locations worldwide, documenting the results in our databases. The fastest routes are determined and implemented into our CDN. Once the best data center location is determined and the best cache servers are selected, the objects are retrieved in parallel depending on the content types.
High Availability
Customer content is distributed worldwide to our CDN cache servers. If the best servers fail or a disaster occurs in that data center area, the content files are safely channeled through the second best cache servers and to the end-user. Even if the primary server fails, the average downtime should be negligible, oftentimes, less than a minute.
Scalability
The Edge Caching CDN solution is scaled over multiple servers and an extremely large bandwidth capacity. The bandwidth capacity limit can be easily adjusted, as each client has different needs. For example customers can increase the guaranteed bandwidth usage limit from 10mbps to 1Gbps with a single request, without any modification from their side. Such an increase might also be applicable if such an expansion is during a short period. Even if the customer’s bandwidth usage increase is unplanned, like DDoS, temporary burst requests can be processed.
Improved Speed
The Edge Caching servers that provide the fastest delivery time are determined based on user location and network status by our patent-pending technologies. Also, the process of parallel retrieval can further improve site performance.
Further features can be customized to each customer:
Protection of Cached Objects
If the cached objects are protected at the origin server, they should be protected on the cache servers as well. For example, some high-quality movies may be shown only to paying users. The cache servers check the authentication/authorization in tandem with the origin server, thus providing the same level of security as the origin server.
Pulling/Pushing Content
In general, the content is retrieved when an actual end-user’s requests arrive at the cache server level. This method, called the “Pull” method, can save bandwidth and storage costs. If the highest level of consistency is required, the content can be pushed onto our publish servers whenever content is added or modified. Using this “Push” method, the content is distributed onto our Edge Caching cache servers in real time.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Edge Caching allows customers to apply additional end-user settings to the CDN platform. Hostway can assign additional application-level information to place customers in different tiers. For example, the requests from GOLD class users (extracted from a cookie value) can be redirected to a high-quality cache server every time they search the site.
Customers can manage and monitor their sites and content within the Edge Caching management tool, SiteControl. These are the main SiteControl components:
Home
This section includes usage summary and billing information.
CDN Status
Provides live status updates of all datacenter locations.
Stats and Usage
Basic Web analytics tool and statistics are housed here. A client density feature details where most of the traffic is coming from worldwide. Billing information based on the bandwidth used is also shown in this screen.
CDN Content
Content management functions, such as purging cached objects, are available here.
Real-Time Monitoring
Real-time usage such as current worldwide aggregated bandwidth usage, number of sessions, number of requests and other information are all gathered and provided for your monitoring.
A company’s online Web content is some of the most vital information available to attract customers as well as partners. The ability to deliver this content quickly and efficiently is imperative to growing any business with an online presence. Hostway’s Edge Caching Content Delivery Network solution helps expand a company’s global footprint, ensuring that customers visiting our clients’ sites experience faster page download times for content of all types. Edge Caching helps create a better customer experience for our clients’ visitors, helping the overall “stickiness” of the site, ultimately leading to a larger bottom line.
If you have questions or would like to get additional information about Edge Caching, please contact Hostway at 1-888-874-1875.
Sphere uses Hostway's content delivery network to speed page loading times, increase availability and serve a global audience with its Related Content Widget.
Sphere is a start-up company with a passion for conversational media. With its origins in blog indexing, Sphere has quickly grown as a provider of key traffic generators for mainstream media sites.
Sphere's flagship product, the Related Content Widget, acts as a bridge between mainstream media and conversational media, like blogs. The widget drives traffic back and forth among hundreds of thousands of blogs and many of the highest traffic news and media sites on the Web.
The widget generates contextually relevant links for each page on which it's placed and serves them up on demand. This ever-growing collection of pages generates increasing volumes of traffic for Sphere.
“Our Sphere Related Content Widget became incredibly popular in a very short period of time. It was being used on more than one billion page views per month, and that number was growing rapidly," said Martin Remy, Sphere's chief technology officer. "We needed a cost-effective way to quickly scale the widget's delivery.”
The widget was already being used on major media Web sites such as The New York Times and popular blogs like GigaOm.
To continue to grow the widget, Remy began searching for a content delivery network (CDN) that would speed the widget's delivery and improve its availability to readers all over the world.
Sphere needed a solution that could:
Sphere has a dedicated hosting plan with Hostway Corporation, and Remy consulted the company for a solution.
"As soon as Martin contacted us with his problem, we knew our Edge Caching Content Delivery Network was the perfect solution to address each of his three concerns," said John Manganaro, Product Manager at Hostway.
For Edge Caching, Hostway established a network of clustered servers in its ultra-secure, high-tech data centers across the globe. These servers, called “cache servers”, store copies of original content for quick retrieval and delivery to the end user.
Hostway's Edge Caching can:
“The blogosphere is a global phenomenon. To ensure fast load times for users all over the world, we needed a global solution like the one Hostway offered,” said Remy.
After reviewing the Edge Caching CDN tool and its simple approach to managing content, Remy knew he had found the right solution.
The SiteControl management feature allows Sphere to quickly and easily update its content on the network and access usage statistics, Web analytics and other helpful tools.
“When designing the Edge Caching SiteControl management tool, we kept everything simple and easy to understand. The customer should be able to get in, do what needs to be done and get out without weaving through a maze,” Manganaro said.
After implementing Edge Caching, Sphere noticed a considerable improvement in the page download speed and now enjoys the added security of high availability. Edge Caching CDN fortifies an already strong product and ensures that the Sphere Related Content Widget performs to the company's high expectations.
“The Hostway Edge Caching CDN solution allowed us to grow very fast and in a cost-effective way, giving us the performance and manageability we need. We’re very happy with this solution, and so are the billions of users who rely on us every month to connect their content,” concluded Remy.
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