(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Two leaders in hosting, publishing, and discovering user-generated content, WordPress.com and Technorati, are now realizing significant gains in site delivery times using the global content delivery network from EdgeCast Networks (www.edgecast.com), dramatically improving load and response times for content in 18 global metropolitan areas.
As the number of people publishing their own online content set to grow nearly 50 percent over the five-year period ending in 2013, according to eMarketer figures, and the consumption of that content to grow more than 200 percent annually, strained servers and an already-overburdened public Internet could lead to very slow or unresponsive sites.
According to Edgecast’s Wednesday announcement, Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) and blog search engine Technorati have addressed this challenge by deploying their sites on the EdgeCast CDN. By serving files from locations much closer to the end user, the EdgeCast network assures WordPress.com that its millions of bloggers can reach the site quickly regardless of their location. As well, those accessing a WordPress.com blog will never have trouble accessing content, regardless of how congested the public Internet may be.
“Making blogging accessible to regular people helped make WordPress.com one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms,” said Paul Kim, Automattic’s VP of user growth. “Equally important to the user experience is accessibility in a more literal sense – serving content quickly to readers and making sure our millions of publishers can always access their blogs without worrying about Internet congestion or overloaded servers. EdgeCast has made lightning-fast load times possible for our millions of users around the world.”
Automattic also recently used the EdgeCast network to stream more than 2,500 video streams from WordCamp San Francisco to hundreds of people around the world, and ensure excellent video performance regardless of the viewer’s location.
Technorati, as one of the top blog search engine, needs to index millions of blog posts in real time and bring them to the surface in seconds. This speed is essential to the site’s value proposition, and the EdgeCast network has improved Technorati’s site loading time, thereby bolstering user loyalty.
“As we’ve grown, so too has our editorial mission,” Technorati media general manager Shani Higgins said in a statement. “We not only help readers find the content they are looking for, but we also provide our own original content on a wide range of subjects,”. “When vying for audience at the breakneck pace of the blogosphere, seconds count – sometimes fractions of a second. By shaving seconds off our site’s loading time, EdgeCast has had a considerable impact on our user experience.”
Earlier this year, EdgeCast made a major upgrade to its global network with the addition of two new strategic points of presence, Singapore and Paris, enabling the CDN to interconnect with more than 800 user networks worldwide, making it one of the best-connected and fastest CDNs.
