EdgeCast Launches Dedicated CDN for eCommerce

CDN provider EdgeCast has built a complete separate, dedicated network to serve eCommerce, dubbed EdgeCast Transact. It’s PCI compliant, and incorporates device detection and dozens of commerce-specific optimizations. This "share nothing" approach to network architecture is unique in the content delivery industry, and might start a trend of offering exclusive footprints to specific sets of customers.

"Nowhere do speed and availability matter more than in eCommerce," said Ted Middleton, EdgeCast VP of product management. "The Internet’s top retailers told us they wanted a discrete, secure, global network that they didn’t have to share with other types of content, so we spent the past year building exactly that."

Edgecast designed, tested and built the new network in major metropolitan centers around the world over the course of a year. It’s based on the same proven methods Edgecast has been using for the past six years on its content delivery network.

The new solution offers optimized communication path to serve content and handle transactions regardless of conditions on the broader internet or with other EdgeCast CDN networks. eCommerce customers completely avoid competition for resources with other customers in different segments.

Security being a major concern, the network is architected with robust redundancy and failover, elastic provisioning for holiday-type traffic spikes, and credit card detection and removal algorithms.

Performance optimizations include secure pre-establishment of sessions between origin and end user. Mobile device detection and front end optimization is built in. Optimization is executed directly on edge servers for the best possible performance.

EdgeCast also aligns the network’s operating policies with eCommerce business cycles, conducting code freezes during the busiest shopping times to ensure 100 percent availability and stability.