Worldwide Performance Study by CCBill
 

FYI, this is an email that is going out to clients today



Dear Valued Client -


On a daily basis, we receive a variety of calls and emails regarding issues with performance and connectivity. When sales dip, we hear from you and other CCBill Clients asking for insight. If Client website connectivity is the issue, our Consumer Support department receives the cancel requests.

Because we take performance and satisfaction very seriously, we decided to task our Policy Review group with testing sites from our main offices, as well as other locations around the globe, to uncover the major performance differences from different geo locations and during certain peak times.

We began by mapping out those times and areas, against the afternoon/evening hours of the population concentrations with relatively easy access to the internet, and the ability to pay for products online.

What we found was that from 10 -35% of the users in that time slot who could purchase products from your site, were unlikely to do so because of very slow connectivity issues. These tests were conducted on Client sites in a variety of cities with a strong history of purchasing powered (i.e. London), and ultimately these sites would take a very long time to load, and/or their video content would lag and thus be non-viewable. As an illustration, lets say the prime purchasing time for our product is 4pm to 10pm around the world. Now throughout your 24 hour day, visitors from that 4-10 slot are hitting your site from around the world and some of them have a very poor connection. Thus at any one point during the day, 10-35% of the users in that slot that could purchase products from your site, are unlikely to do so because of very slow connectivity issues.

With this information, we believe it is important for you to consider that your site may be quick for a good portion of your users, but you may have a small-to-mid percentage of visitors who have the ability to pay for your content, and have access to the internet, but are finding it difficult to join your site or view your content because they are getting download speeds of 2k/sec.

In an effort to address our side of these issues, some months ago we placed all our Sign up Form images (banners, logos, etc.) on a Content Delivery Network* (a network of servers around the globe that enables content on the network to be loaded from the closest/fastest ?node? to the user). As a result of this switch, we have seen a 23% decrease in form load times, most notably in Western Europe, due to the use of CDN in the delivery of our CCBill Forms.

We think the next step in addressing the balance of the website performance issues is to encourage the use of Content Delivery Networks across our client base. Almost every major US website (mainstream) uses content delivery in some form or another in the delivery of their high-traffic and bandwidth pages and images. Because of this increase in the amount of CDN bandwidth, pricing for content delivery is generally now the same as regular bandwidth pricing. Best of all, CDN does not require additional hardware, so there is really no downside to using these systems.


In closing, we at CCBill want to support our entire Client-base in their efforts to:
-maximize site performance
-decrease lost sales and increase member retention
-increase of overall revenue

To assist you in this process, we have listed CDN providers below that have the technology to support your Tours, Protected Member's Content, plus flash and windows media streaming technology:

* Cavecreek CDN -2 week free trial. Test the performance difference between your current Host and CDN with no commitment or automatic billing. One call to us at the end of your trial places you back with your current hosting provider.
* NationalNet CDN
* Mojohost CDN

Many thanks,

Mark Greenspan
VP of CCBill Risk





*Below for your information, are some commonly asked questions about CDN:


GENERAL CDN FAQ'S

What does CDN stand for and how does it work?

A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers around the globe. When you ?offload? your content on a CDN your content gets distributed over this global network and as a result, when your users access your content, they get it from the closest ?node?, rather than from the location your servers are at.


How easy is it to set up?

No additional equipment required. The host name DNS is redirected to the CDN provider and they start to cache right away. The system has tremendous flexibility so you can determine what gets cached and what doesn?t and for how long. Set up can be done in a few days


How can I trust CDN?

CDN technology has been around for more than 10 years and every major website in the US uses it in some form or other. The adult market has not had access to this before since most of the major player have previously not allowed allow adult content on their network, and this attitude has recently changed with the first Major provider (Level 3) getting into the adult market


How would CDN benefit me?

Revenue - Clients have reported speed increases of 100%+ in load times for images and videos on their tours, which translates to shorter wait times for the users and a higher numbers of clicks proceeding to the signup form

Availability - with better performance and less dropped connections users will have higher likelihood to complete transactions and access content quickly.

Scalability ? If there is an expected or unexpected spike in traffic (ie: a mention on Howard Stern) CDN allows you to efficiently absorb the bandwidth with continued lightning fast performance.


Who uses CDN?

The list of people who use CDN is a who?s who from CNN to Disney, yahoo, Google, etc. Mainstream web sites have been benefiting from this technology for years.

How much does CDN cost?

CDN prices have dropped over the years and are now at the same levels at normal bandwidth pricing.


Do I have to be a certain size before I can use CDN?

CDN can be implemented on websites of nearly any size. You can host just the pictures/video on the CDN or host the entire website.

very nice mark

very nice mark

That is a sweet deal :-)
People are forgetting what quality bandwidth is these days and go for bulk of $100 / month servers instead

Are the CCBill signup forms also done through the CDN?

yes, the content on CCBill signup forms has been on our cdn for months.

yes, but how exactly does selling content jive with putting your content up on 3rd party servers ? just as soon as the surfers figure out appending nyud.net to your urls makes them viewable forever from anywhere... uuhhh... they don't even need the hassle of torrents anymore.

CDN supports authentication of the users so if the content is in a protected directory (members area) they will have to gain authorization before they can access the content. This can be done in various ways depending on the CDN being used and the authentication employed by the client.

you still have to trust the cdn.

Correction for the initial post, its not 23% decrease in load times, its 16%, my fault. The updated data is that switching from our images server in Phoenix resulting in a 16% decrease in form load speeds, more interesting data below:

Here are the test results (note that only about 10% of our form content is on the CDN)

Total Request: 97k
Non-CDN(able) content: 87k
CDN(able) content: 10k

Milan, Frankfurt, New York, Boston, Washington DC, Tokyo, Miami, London, Chicago, Paris, San Jose, Sydney, Taipei, and Vancouver were significantly faster on CDN, with the following having increases of between 30% and 65%: Milan, Frankfurt, New York, Boston, Washington DC, and Tokyo

CCBill has been testing/using it for some time on our forms and the performance difference was impressive. You wont find a Major mainstream site not using/trusting this technology

CDN authentication works as a pass through, just as your host will not serve content to your user without proper user name and password, CDN works in the same way, just serving content from a differen location. If your origin rejects the Auth, it will not get served to the customer.

long read

I think in all fairness all hosts that offer CDN should be listed in this 'campaign' WEBAIR has offered CDN services to our clients for years, as do most notable hosting companies IMHO. If you are interested in CDN services check to see that your existing host offers it as well.

Details on WEBAIR'S GLOBAL HOSTING CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN) can be found here: http://www.webair.com/host_cdn.htm

We will also offer a 2 week CDN trial free of charge to all interested parties.

WEBAIR CDN Services Include:

* * 100% Guaranteed Service Level Agreement 24x7 Customer Support Team
* * 24x7 Network Operations Center
* * Networks Web Reporting Package
* * Limelight's network is architected for high-performance, efficient delivery of media content and software.
* * Highly-scalable delivery & storage. Each delivery hub is multi-gigabit connected to top Tier1 Carriers
* * Massively provisioned distribution centers connected to commercial and private peering into all of the major Tier-1 carriers
* * Ultra-scalable distributed delivery network gives best delivery at any usage level and under any network condition.

If your host is carrier neutral you can also purchase CDN directly from Limelight or Akamai. However, since we purchase through both companies in bulk your pricing will be far less with Webair.com. Our CDN technology will support both your Tours and your protected Member content, as well as flash and windows media streaming technology.

If you have any questions of comments we would love to hear from you!

I have been saying this for hours now!

Seeing it's a pass through...can it affect the signup forms?

For example: people fill in the forms, submit them and it times out?
Does the CDN handle HTTPS traffic correctly? Inquiring minds want to know :winkwink:

about time

not sure what your asking here

i hope you do not think that we would go live with something as critical as signup form content without first making sure all our ducks were in a row


if your asking whether some particular CDN setup can conflict with some particular Signup form setup, id guess the answer is that there is always a way to screw something up

if your asking about cdn https, there are several ways to do it, with a shared certificate or a private certificate, but im not the expert on that, but i know people that are, if your curious :)

:disgust :disgust

heard you guys were really expensive

Corvette, how much per meg does your cdn cost? I know there are always special deals for volume, but give us a basic cost per meg?:2 cents:

afrin, i doubt you will find many hosts that will post their bandwidth prices on a message board :) if you want a custom quote to get an idea of how much it is for what, drop me an email

[email protected]

with all due respect, and to be precise, we are particularly referring to hosts using the Level 3 CDN network. While we were doing our series of tests, we switched on Limelight, and had to switch back, because the performance was far lacking compared to the Level 3 CDN. It is my understanding that they are known as the "Rolls Royce" of the Content Delivery Networks and our tests far surpassed our expectations through Level 3 CDN. The hosts we listed?National Net, Mojohost, I believe they are going through Level 3.

This thread needs some pics of tits.

We host on level3 bandwidth I am going to look into this thanks for the info Mark

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Will the ratios on the form page go up and steady themselves?

I know this concerns many people.

Yes a problem.

I Invented WorldWide Performance.

alien, mark, thats great, seriously. i was trying to figure out a way to illustrate that in an explanation, and the closest i came to it was describing being above the earth at the north pole and looking down on a pie chart shaped object.

but your image is exactly how i pictured it, great illustration

The axis is off but thankies:)
Figured it might help some people kinda get the idea:)

i present you a horse with tits

http://www.radiobrennt.com/wordpress...0/big_tits.jpg

thanks again :)

Has anyone noticed a change in sign ups?

Maybe it's time we started to look at CCBILL form hits and conversion ratios and comparing them with before they improved the system.

Start posting.

Better or worse?

So no sponsors or affiliates going via CCBILL online tonight?

just got it... nice to hear

when i go to the enter here link on your site, the link seems to jump away from me. thats a good place for that effect

paulmarkhamteens.com

this needs bump

That's a very nice post...