A UK media company is using edge side includes (ESI), to
dramatically cut the cost of supporting dynamic web content in
large retail websites.
Cantos, which provides business-to-business web TV to 45,000 users,
has farmed out the processing workload required to render dynamic
web content to Akamai using ESI.
Paul Smith, chief technology officer at Cantos, said, "When I
joined the company five years ago, we were paying £125,000 a month
in web hosting. Now, it costs one tenth of that."
Cantos' eight high-end V100 Sun servers were finding it hard to
cope with demand as they needed to dynamically build HTML pages
incorporating video, he said.
The site has been re-engineered so that dynamically created content
is preloaded, or cached, onto the Akamai infrastructure and scripts
running at Akamai render the content.
"It used to take up to 10 seconds for a web page to load, now it
takes a fraction of a second," Smith said. Instead of running the
Sun hardware Cantos has downgraded to two Linux servers.