Not just speed anymore

Content-delivery provider Speedera Networks this week announced a suite of new services designed to ensure that its clients’ Web sites are more reliable, faster and more secure.

The three services--Speedera Failover, Speedera Download and Speedera SSL--were created to take advantage of the company’s global edge delivery network, which Keynote Systems tabbed as the world’s fastest, according to Gordon Smith, Speedera’s vice president of marketing.

“The solution is to put a shortcut around the Internet backbone,” Smith said in describing the philosophy behind the company’s network. “We always route that users’ request to a server that is available and that is closest to them.”

Each of the three new services further utilizes Speedera’s edge servers. The Failover service is designed to give Web sites the appearance of being “up” at all times, even if the server that hosts the site fails. For Failover customers, Speedera maintains a static copy of the Web site on its edge servers that prevents users from getting an “error” message when trying to access a failed site.

“That kind of thing is far preferable to, in effect, closing the blinds and saying, ‘We’re not open, and we have no idea when we will be,” Smith said. “And it’s much less expensive than creating mirrored sites.” While Speedera’s network is structured to cache regularly requested object on its edge servers, clients can give their customers even faster access by utilizing the Download service. This service allows clients to house large files--for example, an application or a video file--on Speedera’s edge servers, which substantially enhances download speeds and greatly reduces the burden on server that houses the site, Smith said.

Speedera’s SSL solution accelerates secure transactions, which are often slowed because the server housing the site is forced to perform all the encryption processes. In the SSL service, this job is performed at the edge-server level.

From a business perspective, Speedera is altering its focus, according to Smith.

“Our strategy has been to sell directly to large enterprises … but that is changing to target channel partners,” he said. “What we do is very complementary to them. We aim to augment their service offerings.”