Heavy testimonial

Founded in 1999, Heavy.com is a consumer media company that offers a broadband entertainment site on which users can control and even participate in their own media experience. Through Heavy.com, users can share, editorialize, and create their own content as well as access the company's library of programming. With a focus on building the leading online entertainment network, Heavy.com relies on a high-performing, available Web site. Unique to the company's business model is its ability to integrate advertising content with the overall entertainment experience. To date, Heavy.com generates most of its revenues via advertisements, attracting big names including Burger King, Coke, Nike, and Sony.

Heavy.com runs its site on a fairly small number of Web and database servers maintained by a hosting provider. As it prepared to process a higher number of dynamic pages, the company considered increasing its hardware and bandwidth. "Going that route would have required us to do more application development to handle page-level caching internally. On top of that, our origin bandwidth would have increased by almost a factor of 10. Akamai takes a proactive approach to understanding our applications and matching our needs to its technologies. Just as important, taking advantage of Akamai services and features does not negatively impact our own development efforts, yet it dramatically improves our ability to serve our site," explains Mike Brittain, Director of Application Development for Heavy.com

"Akamai consistently offloads over 90% of the traffic from our origin servers. Without Akamai in place, we would have had to triple the number of servers we use to host the site."
—Mike Brittain, Director of Application Development, Heavy.com