Eventually, we'll all be online, all the time. As I wrote in the last issue of the tweney report, more than half of U.S. households now have access to the Internet, according to some estimates. Web site businesses are in an unusual position.
Customers expect nearly-instantaneous responses from the sites they are browsing.
Yet, in order to deliver any kind of response at all to a simple mouseclick, a Web site needs to go through a dozen or more intermediaries. That is, data doesn't simply flow from my Web site to your browser via a direct channel. Instead, it's chopped into packets, each of which is passed along a chain of special-purpose computers called routers, handed off from one to the next like a hot potato until it reaches its destination. So how fast customers can download a Web page from your server depends not only on the speed of the server, but also on how rapidly these routers along the way pass the data to one another. And, while some of the routers may be owned by the company that hosts your Web site or your colocation facility, others are owned by companies that have absolutely no accountability to you at all.