While downloading the Creative Media Source media player from the official website, I happened to notice that it was being downloaded from a server in Latvia, which surprised me—why would Creative be based in Latvia?
The answer to this question is revealed below, without an abundance of daunting technical details.
Did you know that when you enter the address www.microsoft.com, you do not actually reach Microsoft’s servers in Redmond? Requests for pages of enormous companies are difficult and expensive to handle simply by increasing the number of servers and the bandwidth of the internet connection they use.
Instead, the following solution is often used: a dedicated third-party company does nothing but create an enormous (thousands or tens of thousands) geographically decentralized network of servers that handles requests for gigantic corporations.
The largest and best-known of these companies is Akamai. It was founded on the work of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is used by such giants as Microsoft and Creative, Audi and Fujitsu. Akamai claims to have more than 18,000 servers in 70 countries and to handle 10–20% of all global internet traffic. Of course, there are different ways to calculate this, and peer-to-peer networks are most likely not included, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Akamai
2006-05-05