Akamai speeds sites built on Web 2.0 technologies

Dynamic Site Solutions suite promises better scalability and performance

Content acceleration specialist Akamai has launched Dynamic Site Solutions, a new suite of tools to help firms improve the performance of their customer-facing web sites.

Dynamic Site Solutions is designed to increase the speed and scalability of business-to-consumer web sites featuring Web 2.0 technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScipt and XML (Ajax), said Akamai's technical consulting manager, David Keane.

"We're seeing a shift in the type of sites people are putting up," said Keane. "Historically people were restricted by the type of modem [on offer] but now creative flair has taken over – a lot of it is coming about because broadband is now so pervasive."

Keane added that many firms do not anticipate that when they take their sites out of a controlled test environment many factors can affect performance, including latency, congestion and peering issues.

"They face challenges when moving content from the datacentre to where the customer is [because] the customers could be coming in from four or five hundred different networks," Keane said. "So we are offering performance and scalability benefits using route optimisation techniques."

Akamai's route optimisation technology means that when a user makes a request the fastest route between the Akamai server and the central infrastructure will always be found – leading to a better user experience, he said.

Another feature of the Dynamic Site Solutions is content prefetching - Akamai requests and pre-loads dynamic content onto its servers before end-users request it, thus enabling the client's web site to present this content more rapidly.

Content targeting capabilities, meanwhile, enable Akamai to understand where an individual user is located, their connection speed, device and other information so content can be tailored to their needs. This presents a better marketing opportunity for web managers, and allows local laws prohibiting the viewing of certain content to be enforced, said Keane.

"Adoption of broadband is putting more stress on the infrastructure and people’s expectations are changing," Keane added. "A vast amount of traffic is coming [through to many sites] and there are no excuses for not being available because the technology exists today."

Bill Kirkwood, chief executive of site performance specialist Site Confidence, said many large retailers mistakenly believe that their sites can cope with more traffic than they can.

"For years companies monitored the performance of their sites inside the firewall, but now they're becoming more aware of the customer experience," Kirkwood said. "In many cases customers are still on dial-up, which makes the performance all the more critical – about five percent of sites at any one time have [some performance problems]."

Kirkwood added that the Akamai products were a "worthwhile investment" but firms should perform benchmarking tests before and after implementation to measure any improvements.