Limelight unveils Web site hosting service

As businesses incorporate more interactive and dynamic content on their Web sites, it becomes harder to ensure that end users and potential customers can access that content quickly. A new service from Limelight Networks aims to take some of the guesswork out of Web site delivery.

Last week the content delivery network (CDN) provider launched LimelightSITE, a hosted service designed to accelerate Web site content and provide a consistent Web experience for end users.

LimelightSITE can speed the performance and lower the cost of delivering static, dynamic and rich media content, Limelight says. The service works by sending site content directly from the edge to the end-user without routing it over the public Internet. Limelight does this by using its existing CDN foundation, which connects more than 9 petabytes of storage capacity to 900+ last-mile access networks around the world.

LimelightSITE also uses Limelight’s OriginDirect routing technology to speed the retrieval of site objects from a data center. The technology helps to bypass Internet bottlenecks by routing requests over Limelight’s private, global fiber-optic backbone. Customers can opt to directly connect their originating servers to this backbone, Limelight says, creating a direct path for retrieving static, dynamic, cacheable or un-cacheable content.

Already more than 100 customers in the enterprise, e-commerce, financial, and public sectors are using LimelightSITE, the vendor says.

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As businesses incorporate more interactive and dynamic content on their Web sites, it becomes harder to ensure that end users and potential customers can access that content quickly. A new service from Limelight Networks aims to take some of the guesswork out of Web site delivery.

Last week the content delivery network (CDN) provider launched LimelightSITE, a hosted service designed to accelerate Web site content and provide a consistent Web experience for end users.

LimelightSITE can speed the performance and lower the cost of delivering static, dynamic and rich media content, Limelight says. The service works by sending site content directly from the edge to the end-user without routing it over the public Internet. Limelight does this by using its existing CDN foundation, which connects more than 9 petabytes of storage capacity to 900+ last-mile access networks around the world.

LimelightSITE also uses Limelight’s OriginDirect routing technology to speed the retrieval of site objects from a data center. The technology helps to bypass Internet bottlenecks by routing requests over Limelight’s private, global fiber-optic backbone. Customers can opt to directly connect their originating servers to this backbone, Limelight says, creating a direct path for retrieving static, dynamic, cacheable or un-cacheable content.

Already more than 100 customers in the enterprise, e-commerce, financial, and public sectors are using LimelightSITE, the vendor says.

On the IT side of things, Limelight points out how LimelightSITE can take some of the burden off internal IT teams responsible for site operations by letting them offload storage, delivery, management and network optimization functions. As a managed service, LimelightSITE also can reduce companies’ capital spending on network infrastructure.

According to Limelight, some of the specifications of LimelightSITE include: 150Mbps throughput; redundant storage services up to 250GB; small-object optimization, including persistent connections, object compression and TTL overrides; and site protection features, including origin failover and load balancing.

Limelight’s new LimelightSITE Web site hosting offering “is a natural next step for a company to offer more hosted solutions that can take advantage of its CDN network,” says Counse Broders, senior research director at research firm Current Analysis.

“Customers that are looking for improved Web site performance, especially with a lot of rich media content will want to investigate Limelight’s new service, as the combination of hosting and CDN delivery may be the right combination,” Broders wrote in a new research brief.

But he warns it could create some conflict between Limelight and the channel partners that sell its CDN offering:

“The LimelightSITE service could make for channel conflict with partners that resell Limelight’s service, especially those companies already offering hosting services that may see this as a threat to their own business model and decide to look elsewhere for a non-competing CDN partner,” Broders wrote.

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