Towards the end of 2021, the Facebook (now Meta) family of apps cost the company nearly $100 million in revenue thanks to a six-hour-long outage. In addition to revenue losses, it drove millions of users to rival platforms, such as Twitter, Telegram, and Signal.
The problem of website downtime is not limited to behemoths like Meta. Uptime Institute’s 2021 Global Data Center Survey reveals that outages are an expensive business for all. Over 60% of the respondents reported losing more than $100,000 to downtime, and of that 60%, 15% lost over $1 million.
So it’s no surprise that companies from SMEs to corporates are looking to mitigate downtime as much as possible. One of the most common weapons in the armory is a content delivery network (CDN), a distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
Because CDNs cache content like web pages, images, and video in proxy servers near to the physical location of the visitor, the originating website could be experiencing issues, but visitors will still get the latest version of the content in your browser. CDN platforms also offer other significant security benefits, and increased website speed aids SEO since Google and others pay attention to how fast pages load.
Mlytics – a digital content delivery and experience monitoring provider – has launched a complete “belt and braces” approach to CDNs, providing its users with a SaaS-based platform that optimizes between multiple providers.
The AI-powered solution re-routes traffic to the most effective CDN’s globally. The routing decision is based on live data such as efficiency or outages, which then avoids disruptions and optimizes the experiences from top to bottom in a way conventional CDN’s aren’t able to do.
“The beating heart of Mlytics is its proprietary Multi CDN solution, leveraging multiple top-tier CDN networks and a smart load balancing solution to constantly deliver the best possible website performance and therefore user experience for any location,” Tars Geerts, Demand Generation Manager of Mlytics, told me,
The platform allows access to the leading CDNs and then manages the process of leveraging each platform’s features.
“Top-tier CDN solution providers like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai all have reliable solutions and have proven to elevate their customers’ websites performance and security,” Geerts said. “However, single CDN solution providers can be – and as recent history has shown – are still causing downtime whenever their services experience bugs or technical glitches.”
Importantly, implementing the solution is straightforward, achievable with a few clicks, and the company claims that ongoing management is minimal.
“In essence, it is possible just to set up the account and let the platform with its load balancing solution run its course,” Geerts said. “In other words, there is no extra maintenance required. On the contrary, almost everything is fully automated. On average, the setup and implementation of a Multi CDN solution via the Mlytics platform takes less than 5 minutes if customers choose to use Mlytics DNS, or about 20 minutes, depending on how long it takes to set up your DNS.”
Of course, you may already be wondering what it might cost to maintain multiple CDNs and then add Mlytics on top. With pricing plans from free to $500 a month and a custom enterprise plan, MLytics says that CDN costs are typically not affected.
“By default, users will have access to 3 different CDNs, namely Cloudfront, Stackpath, and GMA, and no additional costs are calculated for these CDNs,” Geerts said.
Recently, MLytics was officially recognized in Gartner’s Market Guide for Global CDN, and it has plans to expand its solutions beyond its current offerings.
“Mlytics is building an ecosystem, built to enhance digital experience delivery and monitoring,” Geerts said.
It may not be the answer for the “S” in SME. Still, given the revenue, user, and reputational losses involved in downtime, and the risk of putting all eggs in one CDN basket, it certainly offers an interesting approach to the problem.
This article originally appeared on Grit Daily and is reproduced with permission.
