If you’re a big huge e-commerce business, your time is money. Literally. Amazon.com made $61 billion last year, which boils down to $167 million a day, $7 million an hour, and $116,000 a minute. Every minute counts, which is why you cant afford to have your website go down or be slow, even for just a little while.
That’s why Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages.
While a number of CDNs tout features that e-commerce websites crave, like application acceleration, page optimization, and small-object delivery, EdgeCast is the only one that has broken its e-commerce offering out and put it on its own dedicated network infrastructure. And the company has spent the last year designing and testing out this purpose-built network for e-commerce providers so that they don’t have to share any infrastructure with media companies or social networks or whatever.
That means that e-commerce companies won’t have to worry if there’s a DDOS attack against a media company, or a surge in traffic during the Super Bowl at a social networking site, or whatever. The network is also built to be fully redundant and have all sorts of failover and elastic provisioning to handle holiday traffic spikes and the like.
For clients, that’s like not just buying a Rolls Royce, but having your own private highway to drive it on. At least, that’s what EdgeCast president James Segil says.
Anyway, in addition to having their own private infrastructure, EdgeCast Transact is designed to provide secure sessions between the origin and end user. It also has mobile device detection and front-end optimization built in, to ensure the best performance regardless of the platform or device someone’s using to access the site.
E-commerce companies benefit from also having access to a dedicated customer support team and “white-glove service,” which Segil says is needed for most of those customers. It’s also going to be updated with the needs of business customers in mind — which means e-commerce business cycles, code freezes during the holidays and other busy shopping seasons.
EdgeCast continues to win business in the CDN market, with more than 6,000 customers. Those clients include some big names, like Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Etsy, and Tumblr. (Don’t worry, Yahoo is a client too.) The company now has about 260 employees, most of which are in the United States… Although it’s been expanding its footprint with sales and support internationally.
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