Introducing LimelightSITE for whole web site delivery

This morning, we announced LimelightSITE(tm), a new service platform designed for “whole web site” delivery.

What is “whole web site” delivery? It’s the efficient transmission of all of the elements that make up every page of a web site, with the goal of ensuring that the end-user has a brilliant experience with the web site. These elements can be smaller-sized objects like text, scripts, thumbnails, or code for a media player, personalization items (like a profile picture), or larger objects like training videos or interactive product demonstrations. Prior to today, Limelight Networks has offered only object delivery with our LimelightDELIVER and LimelightSTREAM products. This means our technology was best suited for, say, streaming a two-hour high-definition movie on behalf of a content publisher. The whole site delivery provided by LimelightSITE means that now we have services for optimally delivering that movie, all of the elements that surround that movie on the web page (the player, logos, graphics, text), and all of the items on the other pages on that web site.

One of the key features introduced with LimelightSITE is our Limelight OriginDirect(tm) routing technology. This innovation helps speed the retrieval of site objects from a data center by using our private, global fiber-optic backbone to bypass “middle-mile” Internet bottlenecks. Here’s an analogy to understand how OriginDirect speeds up both the retrieval and the delivery of the objects that make up a web site:

Think of the public Internet as an eight lane highway, and the cars on that highway as the objects that make up a web site. These objects have to travel from their starting point (the originating server that stored the objects) to a destination (a web browser where they can be viewed or interacted with). When there’s no traffic on the road, things work great. The cars drive up and down the highway and get to and from their destination in the expected time (or, to step back from the analogy, the objects are retrieved and delivered as expected and the web page loads quickly in a browser).

But what happens when the Internet gets congested, or, for the analogy’s sake, there’s traffic on the highway? The cars have to slow down because of the congestion ahead, and they will arrive at their destination later than expected. Stepping back again from the analogy, that delay in the real world means that a web page will load slower than expected, which more than likely could lead to a frustrated site visitor, a poor product demonstration, or even a lost sale. So avoiding traffic is an important key for making visitors happy and generating sales from a web site.

Some of our competitors will try to make up time by “optimally routing” a car around the traffic jam on the highway. They can’t actually avoid the traffic altogether, because their cars still have to travel on the same public roads on which the traffic jam is occurring. However, they’ve spent years developing complex, mathematical algorithms that may tell the car to get off the highway a few exits early and take side streets to avoid the traffic. However, despite their experience and even though it eventually finds a path around the congestion, the fact remains that car still has to travel on the road where the traffic is, and its forward progress will be impeded just by the mere presence of traffic on that road. The end result is that the car still arrives late, just not as late as if it had just stayed on the main road and waited for the traffic to clear up.

Rather than trying to maneuver our way around a traffic jam using math, Limelight Networks decided to avoid the road altogether. That’s how OriginDirect works.

At the heart of OriginDirect is Limelight’s global fiber optic backbone, part of our highly complex hardware and software network infrastructure that we’ve spent the past 8 years building, expanding and tuning for optimal performance. This backbone is essentially a private, global Internet that only Limelight Networks customers have access to. So while cars on the public roads are trying to route around traffic, our customers are driving virtually unimpeded to their destination on our own, privately operated and maintained highway. This means our customers’ objects encounter less traffic, have more predictable arrival times, and ultimately much more certain, consistent performance for heir web site experience.

We’ve got over 1,300 customers that today realize the benefits of this backbone and our other services, including over 100 in the enterprise, e-commerce, financial services, and public sectors.If you are interested in talking with us about LimelightSITE, don’t hesitate to email us.

For more information on LimelightSITE, including a list of key features, read the press release here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 4:53 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network, Mike Gordon, dmi2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.