TEMPE, Ariz. - CCBill has released the results of a worldwide performance study conducted after years of clients' complaints about intermittent connectivity, and announced plans to act on the results.
The problems, the company said, sometimes led to reduced sales and resulted in some clients canceling their memberships.
"When our policy-review department would then test those sites from our main offices, as well as view them from other locations around the globe, we would discover major performance differences from certain locations during certain peak times," Mark Greenspan, CCBill's vice president of risk management, said in a news release.
The study, which shows when those times and where those locations are and maps them out against areas with relatively easy access to the Internet and the ability to pay for products online, found that qualified customers were unable to join sites up to 35 percent of the time because of connectivity issues.
"As a result of this information, some months ago, we installed all of our sign-up forms onto a content delivery network (a global network of servers that enable content to be loaded from the closest or fastest "node" to the user), which resulted in an overall 23 percent increase in form-load times, most notably in Western Europe," Greenspan said.
Now, he said, CCBill is ready to encourage use of content delivery networks across its client base in an effort to help customers maximize their sites' performance and avoid wasting opportunities for sales and member retention.
"Every major (mainstream) U.S. website uses content delivery in some form or other, and as the pricing for content delivery is generally the same as regular bandwidth pricing and it requires no additional hardware, there is really no downside to using these systems," Greenspan said.
Content delivery network providers that have the technology to support protected member content, as well as Flash and Windows Media streaming technology, are Cavecreek, which is offering a free two-week trial; Natnet; Mojohost; and Limelight, which does not accept adult content.
