How does Akamai work?

[Cloudzilla]

This Akamai sounds really interesting. How, exactly, does it work?

[Steve]

Hi CloudZilla

This page (and the illustration) will give you an idea of how it works.

http://texo.co.za/akamai-cdn.html

Basically, Akamai will serve your website's static content (images, javascript, css, pdfs etc) from their 60 000+ edge servers in over 60 countries around the world, so that no matter where in the world your visitors are, the vast majority of your website's content will be served locally (very fast) for them.

The Texo website itself has all its content served via Akamai. You will notice that the urls for all the images, for example, start with http://akamai.texo.co.za/ which means that instead of being served by the Texo server, they are being served by Akamai.