Web Performance Profile: Cedexis

The cloud. Private data centers. Global delivery networks.

Brands have many choices when it comes to where they should put their infrastructure. The considerations that need to be made can be both time-consuming and overwhelming. In this month's Hosting Panel article, Website Magazine profiles Cedexis, more specifically, its Radar community.

For the unfamiliar, Cedexis provides independent performance benchmarking and optimization across clouds, data centers and content delivery networks (CDNs). A key component of Cedexis is its Radar community, which is a crowd-source collaboration that helps participating businesses pick the best infrastructure for their companies based on actual data. In other words, it's a way to evaluate different services without actually deploying them, according to Cedexis Chief Marketing Officer Rob Malnati.

Cedexis Radar can be leveraged in a variety of ways, but one way to do so (without actually signing up for a free account) is to view its demonstration, which runs two tests - one in the cloud (with services like Rackspace, Windows Azure and more) and one with global delivery networks (like Akamai, Highwinds and more). With these tests, the user's browser measures the performance of several platforms as seen from their current networks.

Brands looking to go a step further in their performance evaluation, can sign up for the Radar community and get a tag to place the HTML in the pages they wish to measure. This allows users to compare their private data centers, for example, with how their Web pages would perform using another source for hosting that same content.

To explain this idea further, let's say a Web user visits Nissan.com (a Cedexis client). They automatically, without knowing it, download JavaScript as part of the Web page. If Nissan has the Radar tag embedded in their site, they would be able to collect data on the end-user experience, or what the experience could look like, with other services besides the one they currently use (in this case, Rackspace). This answers the question, "Where should I put my infrastructure."

Cedexis, of course, has paid services, such as its OpenMix product, which leverages Radar data, and other information like costs and datacenter metrics, to load balance end-users across locations, according to Malnati. Services like Cedexis enable businesses to focus on the end-user experience, rather than infrastructure, which can increase key performance indicators.


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