This week a client asked me about optimizing the delivery of the media-rich, bandwidth intensive website. In addition to working on the code and technology directly on-site, I thought it may be worth looking into third party content delivery and optimization. Here’s a few notes I made on some of the options out there.
Service: Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator
- Primarily aimed at overal site optimization and delivery
- Providing a personalized user experience that encourages consumers to browse and buy requires rich, interactive content and applications that are generated dynamically. However, richer content slows page downloads and can even lead to site abandonment. Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator gives you performance that is up to five times faster than your original Web infrastructure and handles the specific requirements of dynamically generated content—without a costly hardware buildout.
Service: Akamai Media Delivery
- Primarily aimed at media delivery
- Akamai’s Media Delivery offers a complete solution for companies to build successful digital media businesses by helping media providers deliver and monetize media assets quickly and effectively. Our global streaming platform extends your reach instantly, enables you to bypass traditional server and bandwidth limitations, and handle peak traffic conditions and large file sizes with ease—all without requiring additional infrastructure. Akamai Media Delivery enables the secure delivery of innovative rich media experiences—from video sharing to high-definition video online—quickly and flawlessly.
- LimelightSITE is a web acceleration solution that effortlessly delivers all the elements — JavaScript objects, style sheets, rich media, and images — that make up the pages on your site, from a one-page product overview to a 10-minute training video. The latest release offers added control over cache management, SSL support, increased failover options, and integrated content security options.
Mirror Image Internet: Global Content Caching
- Mirror Image’s Global Content Caching solution cost-effectively delivers content and accelerates the user experience. It offloads processing and protects Web sites from traffic spikes by leveraging our global Content Access Point® (CAP) network to ensure optimal performance. With broad content support and an unsurpassed cache hit ratio, this solution bypasses Internet congestion and trims Web site processing costs to reliably serve static and dynamic content to users worldwide.
- Free, locally installed caching proxy layer – free implementation
- Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.
- Specifically: Cloudfront (Coupled with S3) – https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront
- Amazon CloudFront makes it easier to distribute content to end-users quickly, with low latency and high data transfer speeds. The service lets you deliver your content through a worldwide network of edge locations and automatically routes end-user requests to closest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no long term contracts or monthly commitments and you only pay for what you use