Akamai

Save Money on Private SSL CDN and Improve Performance at the Same Time

SSL support in your site, and therefore, in your CDN is critical but it is also incredibly expensive. In this article, I'll show you how to save a fortune while improving the performance and security of your site.

It used to be that sites only encrypted the most sensitive traffic with their customers, i.e. registration, login, checkout, etc. In 2010, the Firesheep extension made it very clear that this is not enough.

Since then, many other attacks on partially encrypted sites have been devised and so major sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others have all switched to HTTPS by default, aka Always On SSL. Last year, Google called for HTTPS everywhere and later, announced that secured sites will get boosts in PageRank.

When 99.999% Isn't Good Enough

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term "Five Nines" referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but "Five Nines" are relative. If your time frame is a week, then your service can be unavailable for 6.05 seconds whereas a time frame of a year, allows for a very respectable 5.26 minutes.

In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they aren't trying to use it. On the other hand, if you're handling 50,000 transactions per second, 6.05 seconds of unavailability could cost you 302,500 transactions and no one cares if you met your SLA.

This problem is one I've come up against a number of times in the past and recently even more and the issue is orders of magnitude in IT. The larger the volume of business you handle, the less relevant the Five Nines become.