While hosting services undoubtedly thrived last year on the back of strong growth in online video and audio, for that to continue providers must ensure their quality of service can cope with the rise in demand
Last year online video enjoyed huge growth on the back of the iPlayer, with Facebook now claiming to be the biggest single driver of traffic to YouTube after Google itself. Streaming music too had a good year, boosted by services such as Spotify and We7. Social media continued to grow, whether in the form of micro-blogging site Twitter or social networking on the likes of Facebook.
Last year, Facebook's users leapt from 150m to 350m. With the majority (70%) now outside the US, the site has to focus on being fast to load wherever it's accessed. Facebook has had to re-engineer how it serves and stores the more than 2.5bn photos that are uploaded to the site each month, building a dedicated infrastructure that merges photo serving and storage into one physical tier.
Behind the scenes, Facebook now uses an HTTP-based photo server, which stores images in a generic object store called Haystack. This is just one example of how the popularity of a service can bring challenges of its own for the site's owners. We asked hosting providers, delivery networks and media owners to share lessons from last year and look ahead to 2010.
Matt Dibben Head of sales, DediPower
There has been an increase in traffic to do with a boom in online content generally. Of course, that includes video, Flash - everything from the style and content to the infrastructure of standard websites is vastly different from three years ago.
Equally, the ability to provide richer content online which is accessible, robust and quick has moved forward as technology has moved forward. A notable number of new sites came on-stream in the latter part of 2009 which have rich-media elements such as video. Clearly there are industries that are absolutely right for video, such as music and gaming - all of these areas, as far as we can see, have very steady growth.
These things don't tend to happen in spikes, especially when you have such a rich and diverse customer base. You're dealing with so many industry verticals in any given month that things even out.
The challenge for just about every business we speak to is taking an idea to market in a way that's cost effective. There has been a big increase in that entrepreneurial market. The start-ups that have great ideas have managed to source funding, but you still have to be able to deliver that in a cost-effective way. For a new business with a customer base and big upfront investment to deliver very rich content, that's quite a difficult formula for investors to get their head around.
It really boils down to delivering a secure environment that's always accessible for clients night and day. But I would say that without question the number-one concern from existing companies that have invested in hosting and potential hosting customers is support.
The market is constantly moving. We're all seeing areas of growth within the hosting market. We're already seeing and will continue to see companies consolidating their IT and lowering their capital and operational expenditure, to make themselves more robust.
You can look at cloud hosting in two ways. Some companies are using it as a marketing exercise to generate new business, which means there isn't a consistent message about what the cloud represents from hosting providers. You'll speak to a client that has been to several hosting providers trying to get a solution together and it has been given what's called a cloud solution which looks completely different from one to the other. I do believe end users aren't fully educated as to why they should use a cloud over a standard hosting solution.
When it's technically and commercially sensible to do so, then we do recommend cloud solutions. This boils down to quality suppliers telling clients what that solution should have, or you can try to understand what they're trying to do with their business and then create services that tie in with their growth plan. If the cloud becomes part of that solution then it's certainly a fantastic opportunity, but the cloud environment only becomes worth doing financially over a certain value. It's a means not an end in itself.
Efecakarel Founder and CEO, The Auteurs
Our users want great movies and they don't want to wait to watch them. A lot of companies will focus on just one or two major territories, which leaves the rest of the world out in the cold. By contrast, our video is served by Bitgravity, a leading content delivery network with servers spread around the world so it can serve video at local speeds everywhere.
In 2009, over 2m people visited the site, which is impressive given we only launched just over a year ago. Our largest audience is from New York, followed closely by London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Chicago, Paris, San Francisco, Berlin and Istanbul. Our films are available to watch in 178 countries, making The Auteurs the first global movie site. Our traffic in December 2009 was six times what it was in January 2009, and we're already seeing faster growth this year.
We're obsessed with user experience. For instance, we're always careful that the social features we add to the site and integrate with other services such as Facebook and Twitter don't result in slow page load times. We've put a lot of effort into moving those service hooks into the background so they don't affect the snappiness of the site. But those things are the low-hanging fruit of website optimisation. In the coming year, as our traffic grows, performance bottlenecks will emerge that will require us to redesign our application. Trying to predict these in advance is less effective than remaining agile and being prepared to swap components with minimal engineering effort. That sounds great on paper but actually making it happen requires keeping things simple and always keenly focused on the company's core vision. Fortunately, those goals dovetail perfectly with the creation of great user experiences.
Oliver Slipper joint-CEO, Perform Group
We acquire rights that we stream on our own behalf on a pay-to-view basis, and we supply online bookmakers like Bet 365, Ladbrokes and William Hill with a very large volume of live sport content.
We've seen continuous growth in online video consumption. From our point of view, the biggest peak was for the England versus Ukraine World Cup match, which has hundreds of thousands of online views. That was a major event of national interest that wasn't on national TV. After that, on a global basis would come something like a Milan Derby or the Wimbledon Tennis final live, with tens of thousands of views globally.
Our primary business models are generally commercial, available on a pay-to-view or subscription basis, or reserved for people who are logged in. So we never deliver the volumes that the BBC delivers but we streamed something like 14,000 live sports matches last year. The numbers continue to grow. We're regularly delivering audiences of between 5,000 and 10,000 globally, who are watching live video content.
The big consideration for us is that we almost always deliver content to a global audience, whether it's a live audio stream of Tottenham Hotspur or a Serie A match. So, unlike the BBC, which only delivers content to the UK, we need to ensure we're partnered with a content delivery network (CDN) whose backbone literally has good points of presence all over the world. In our CDN partner selection we need to ensure that it's someone who can cope with a global audience.
In terms of the delivery of our betting product low latency is critical because obviously we're delivering a product that people are betting on online so you can't afford to have a 15 or 20-second delay. Anything up to five seconds is an acceptable latency.
We use Level 3, Akamai, and Limelight, with Akamai being the biggest in terms of the amount we shift through it. We partner with whoever's suitable for the delivery of content. If we're trying to target the Chinese market, we may use a CDN that has a very strong backbone in China. But from our experience, Akamai is a very strong global presence, as increasingly are Level 3 and Limelight.
In 2010, we know we need to buy bigger buckets of bandwidth because the consumption of products we're delivering is growing. You buy future allowances of bandwidth from the CDNs. The other big thing for us is adaptive streaming: the ability to deliver a stream to end users depending on what bandwidth they have rather than having one or two different streaming speeds. You want to be able to optimise delivery to the end user. We're working with the likes of Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe and Akamai to ensure that we can always deliver a stream that's suitable to the customer.
Bandwidth costs are the same as anything: the more you commit the better rates you get. We look at our output over 6-12 months, get an idea of what the volume of streams is going to be and then try to buy the exact right amount [from the CDN] to ensure we get the best possible bandwidth rate. I wouldn't say things are getting more expensive. There are ways of getting bandwidth incredibly cheaply - for example, on peer-to-peer networks - but that doesn't always work from our point of view. We're not an illegal streaming site, we're a premium network that has to deliver a high-quality experience. From our point of view, bandwidth's getting cheaper because we're doing more and more streaming so we have bigger and bigger bandwidth costs, which mean we can get a better rate.
During this summer's World Cup there will be a lot of video streaming going on but there's not a lot of other sport happening so it's not as if we have a clash. So I don't think we'll see any falls in performance because of the World Cup. Matches are being played on European time so all the games will be in the evening, so people are unlikely to watch it on the internet rather than TV.
As long as you've invested in the right technology and infrastructure, whether it's from an encoding point of view or having the right partners, I don't see that we're going to have major performance issues. If all the ISPs continue to invest in the digital backbone of Great Britain, making sure their networks are better able to cope with streaming video, things will get better.
From our point of view, the concerns are more commercial. For example, the impact of pirate websites on our ability to monetise content is something that we have to be very wary of, continuing to lobby the Government and working with sport federations and rights holders to try to close down these pirate websites.
Neil Barton Director, Hostway
With the continued growth in online traffic, scalability and resilience were major considerations for many websites last year. Well-performing and responsive websites are critical for businesses selling over the internet. If a site, or specific pages within it, is slow to load, then users are more likely to look elsewhere, which could result in lost business and revenue.
There's no sign of online traffic slowing this year, so scalability and resilience will continue to be important. With the growth of mobile internet services and devices, ensuring that users have a consistent and reliable web experience across both traditional and mobile channels will be key to businesses' continued online success.
Undoubtedly, the growth in online video is putting a lot more pressure on websites, particularly in terms of loading times. Therefore, the hosting behind sites needs to be scalable enough to cope with increased levels of multimedia content while delivering the same high-quality user experience. There's a whole host of technologies and techniques that can help online businesses with the delivery of multimedia content. Using a combination of intelligent load balancing, content caching and content delivery networks, businesses can significantly improve the performance of online video and help to optimise the user experience.
