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By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.comDecember 7, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The holiday season presents online retailers with the most brisk few weeks of business in the year, but with it comes an increase in traffic that puts significant pressure on their e-commerce systems. With the threat to business that even a few minutes of downtime presents, online retailers rely on their Web hosting providers to make sure they are well-prepared for the traffic.
Handling the holiday traffic load, can be a complex undertaking - even for an experienced Web host. And hosts often enlist the help of specialized vendors to provide the technology they need to take care of e-commerce customers.UK-based Zeus Technology (zeus.com) develops software to help Web hosts and other service providers manage such traffic loads. The company's flagship product Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager performs three central functions: optimization, management and security. ZXTM secures application traffic, while enabling applications to run faster and more optimally. The solution runs on any commodity hardware platform and can be deployed directly in existing data center architectures.
"The benefit to the hoster is we're software," says Paul Di Leo, CEO of Zeus Technology. "As long as they give us the requisite hardware, which is commodity hardware, then they are able to embed us many times into their infrastructure and provide that service to multiple customers and multiple areas of their back end applications."
ZXTM enables a Web host's e-commerce customers to manage their traffic according to any given business logic."We have an ability to prioritize the type of customers that will be given different services from the Web site," says Di Leo. So for example, ZXTM can divert resources and bandwidth to customers that are going to be buying something, rather than those casual site visitors just browsing the site.
The company's TrafficScript technology makes this possible by enabling online retailers to configure and manage application traffic according to their own specific business needs. "You can change the rules and the logical build out of a product, depending on how you see your business requirements," says Di Leo.
ZXTM's deep packet inspection capabilities not only enable hosts to read XML documents and reroute them according to set policies, but it helps them manage flash crowd traffic that is typical of the holiday shopping season."We're able to assist the application to alleviate the flash crowd problem because it inspects the whole content flow," says Di Leo. "Then the enterprise or service provider can start to prioritize that traffic very granularly and understand where it goes."
The technology makes a great deal of sense for Web hosting companies, which are home to e-commerce sites of all sizes. One US-based Web hosting company uses ZXTM on the front end of a virtual environment. The host provides load balancing, application security and optimization to its small business e-commerce customers, while the more advanced policy-based traffic management capabilities are delivered to its larger e-commerce retailers. Zeus's traffic management technology is growing in popularity within the hosting space and will continue to be an area of focus, Di Leo says. British Telecom deploys Zeus for its shared hosting infrastructure and other customers include The Planet Internet Services, Cable & Wireless and Telewest.
But it is the holiday season demands of e-commerce retailers that demonstrate to hosts how important it is to make the necessary technical preparations. "At Christmas," says Di Leo, "it is going to become quite key in terms of how they are going to manage traffic or any compelling event that creates irrational traffic flows."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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