Conxion Unveils New Caching, Delivery Services

Conxion

The services are based on Conxion's HotRoute digital delivery network, which houses customers' site data on servers in multiple data centers and serves it up to end users from the servers closest to them, said Phil Simmonds, senior director of product marketing at Conxion, Santa Clara, Calif.

Conxion's digital delivery network differs from a traditional content delivery network in that it can accelerate both static and dynamic content, such as a database application, locally without having to route requests for dynamic content back to the origin server.

Conxion Cache-on-Demand is a service that puts caching appliances into Conxion's data centers to store and deliver content from the edges of its network. Customers using the services can choose to optimize delivery of specific content, even if it is located on servers housed by another hosting provider, said Simmonds.

"The origin servers would be individual machines somewhere on the network," he said.

The service, which is priced as low as $1.50 per gigabyte, pulls the content directly from the origin server into the caching appliance rather than requiring the client to duplicate content on multiple servers, he said.

In contrast, Conxion FTL (Faster Than Light), another of the services introduced Monday, is a higher-end service that enables customers to build applications such as Web services, application services and databases on multiple machines to be optimally served up to end users, he said.

A typical Conxion FTL implementation costs about $10,000 per month, he said.

Conxion also introduced EDU Conxion, an Internet access service for colleges and universities that the hosting provider hopes will help it balance the flow of incoming and outgoing Internet traffic across its network.

Education customers who commit to push a minimal amount of traffic to the Internet can access, or pull, five times that amount for free, Simmonds said.

"We primarily push content for our customers into the Internet, but we don't have as much traffic coming back from the Internet, so the benefit to us is that this puts more traffic on the access side and helps us equalize flow," said Simmonds.

Finally, the hosting provider introduced Conxion CacheTransit, a service that connects other hosting providers that don't own their own networks to the Conxion network, enabling them to purchase both bandwidth and content delivery services from a single provider, he said.