The trick? Use cash to get cache and other goodies.

You know the symptoms: faces locked in zombielike trances, eyes glazed, fingers strumming away to a soundless beat. Those are the physical effects of the dreaded worldwide wait.

The worldwide wait also can suck up some serious green. Consumers start rejecting e-tail sites after just fifteen seconds of waiting for the initial page to load. News and information sitesâ€"from CNN to Rolling Stoneâ€"know a slow news-access day means lower click-through rates and lower advertising revenue. Even within the corporate house, jamming up crucial intranet applications will cut productivity and profits.

The name of the game is content delivery, dishing out Web pages that range from HR manuals, to Amazon.com specials, to Star Wars trailers. The content could play over the corporate network or to any way station in one of 180-plus connected countries. The players are just about anyone: resellers, integrators, xSPs or corporate partner managers.

Major contenders in the content delivery game are F5 Networks, Akamai Technologies and Inktomi. F5 makes hardware appliances and software. Akamai is a service provider. And Inktomi's Traffic Server is available for a variety of platforms. Although they offer different products, each tackles the same Web-wait-related problems.

Once Is Not Enough

As to communications lines, the best thing a site can do is to have big enough pipes. That translates into having enough bandwidth available and, in the case of the larger sites, redundant communications lines.

Unfortunately, redundant lines won't always protect a site when a backhoe takes out the data lines or an upstream router flakes out.

That's why companies like AT&T and Exodus Communications have multiple hosting centres located throughout the world. If one site goes down, other sites pick up the load.

Another "push-to-the-edge" strategy involves installing caching servers on various ISP or backbone networks in different geographic locations. As a chunk of hardware, caching servers run about US$10,000 each and can be clustered.

Having more than one Web site means you must direct incoming traffic to the best site. The intelligence must factor in not just the requester's or site/cache's locations, but also network congestion and traffic conditions at each site. In other words, the closest Web site is not always the best choice. F5 provides such front-end intelligence in its 3DNS box for about US$35,000.

Keeping content up-to-date on all sites also requires a publishing system that tracks and replicates the changed pages from the originating Web site to the secondary Web sites. Figure about another US$30,000 for the system.

At Your Service

Partnering with a content provider like Akamai is another option. To date, the company has deployed more than 4,250 content and caching servers spread over 225 different networks throughout the world.

Akamai provides guaranteed content bandwidth. For example, a contract to provide 1 megabyte of data per second costs about US$1,995 per month. The Web site must rewrite its Web page to use Akamai URLs that will distribute graphics, streaming multimedia or text through the Akamai network. Generally, the home page, common graphics and some streaming multimedia content is delivered via the Akamai service.

Akamai also provides extra bandwidth to handle extreme traffic peaks. That service allowed 500,000 users to grab the McAfee antiviral solution to the ILoveYou virus on the day the fix was published.

Akamai has an interesting proposition for ISPs: They can receive a caching server at no charge. The partnership gives the ISP's customers faster access to the content of Akamai customers like CNN, Tower Records and Yahoo.

Your Content, Please
Internet congestion and disruptions will keep content delivery in style. Whether it's the hardware, the consulting or the service, partners can find funds in pushing content to the edge of the Web. They just have to make sure it doesn't go over the edge.

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