Patent ID: 7743132

Claim:
A process for a secure content delivery and global traffic management network, comprising: hosting customer content that can be cached and/or stored on a plurality of caching servers connected to the network; wherein the customer is a customer of a service that manages the plurality of caching servers, the customer paying a fee to the service for hosting customer content on the caching servers; wherein the caching servers respond to requests for the hosted customer content; receiving a user request for customer content on a customer's server, the customer's server managed by the customer; authorizing the user on the customer's server for access to the requested customer content; calculating an authorization value on the customer's server using any of: the user's IP address, corporate gateway IP address, or proxy server IP address; sending a Universal Resource Locator (URL) to the user in response to the user's customer content request, the URL containing the authorization value and specifying a caching server that hosts the requested customer content; and selecting the caching server from the plurality of caching servers by load balancing requests for hosted customer content among caching servers that host the requested customer content.