Rob Station, PEER 1
The Duality of Ecommerce

Ecommerce is a complicated business. Setting yourself apart from rival websites offering similar products is very difficult. Customers tend to be more fickle, margins tend to be low, and there are few things that set on e-retailer apart from the next.

• Site experience - Within the first minute, a user of your website has already made up his mind if his time is being wasted. Slow navigation due to unloaded button images, late product thumbnails, or a general slow loading page can make a customer hit the back button and go to a competitor.
• Price - Customers demand a good deal when they shop online. Planning your infrastructure carefully definite priority, as profits can be eaten up quickly by the costs of new servers and increased bandwidth. Can you afford to raise your prices? Do you have a plan to grow your site?

Technical Aspects of Site Experience

When you think about hosting an e-commerce website, there are two factors that affect your site’s perceived speed more than anything else. The first factor is available bandwidth, or how much data your site can send out at once. A site’s typical bandwidth budget is made up mostly of large image, movie and sound files. Regular html, asp, cfm, perl or php files are quite small and do not affect bandwidth much.

The second factor is load. Load is the computational load on your server (or servers) cpu, ram and disks. Load is usually tied to your dynamic files, such as the aforementioned, low-bandwidth asp, cfm, perl or php. These scripts interpret input from your customers (through things like search boxes or additions to shopping carts), and use cpu cycles to generate a new page.

Both excessive load and excessive bandwidth can slow down your site, either by making a customer wait to long to download a page due to all available bandwidth being used up, or a server using too much of a site’s cpu and ram resources, resulting in pages that are generated very slowly.

Isolating your Resources

Large e-commerce retailers will split their sites into two pieces. If you set up two hostnames:

www.internetstore.com as well as resources.internetstore.com

You can keep all of your dynamic content (your load-heavy files, like your asp, cfm, perl or php scripts) on your main www.internetstore.com site. When you want to load an image, movie or sound file, you can reference it from your resources.internetstore.com site.

Splitting up your load content and your bandwidth content lets you address each need individually.

The PEER 1 Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Imagine moving all of your high-bandwidth content to a network designed specifically to carry and distribute it in the fastest, most efficient way possible. With one simple DNS change, your resources website can now be hosted away from your servers, on our CDN network. The PEER 1 CDN is a content delivery network, a large global network built on the idea of nodes in major North American and European cities, each node containing multiple servers that speedily distribute your files. Users of your site will receive all of your high bandwidth page elements from a node close to them, no matter if they are in LA or Amsterdam.

A side benefit of the PEER 1 CDN is increased load capacity on your other machines. By moving all of these high-bandwidth files on to our machines, your machines are less taxed by the load of file delivery, letting you use fewer machines to do the same job. All of this is effects your bottom line.

Price
The cost-effectiveness of the PEER 1 CDN is one of its best features, our packages start at a low monthly cost, much less than the price of additional bandwidth links in different cities, colo and servers. Our solution is completely scalable; you can grow with it and add bandwidth over time.

Start a free trial today
PEER 1 will offer you a free trial of their CDN service, allowing you to see the difference our CDN can make in your e-commerce web-serving. For more information on the PEER 1 CDN, please call toll free 1.866.683.7747 or visit peer1.com