E-commerce

Today, according to even the most conservative estimates, the number of people and businesses that purchase goods and services on the Internet is well into hundreds of millions. Several leading experts are estimating the dollar value of these transactions to be in several hundreds of billions.

As a small or medium business (SMB) joining the e-commerce world, you face a unique set of both, technical and business challenges to the design and management of your Internet network infrastructure. In terms of technology, inadequate server capacity, scalability concerns, and fault-tolerant reliability, as well as the increasing size and complexity of E-commerce applications, continue to place added pressures on your already over-burdened IT staff and budget.

A properly functioning site that is continuously up-and-running while providing optimum performance is the key factor to the success of any e-commerce initiative. Users of your site must be provided with a consistently positive experience both, in terms of performance as well as accessibility. Sluggishness in perceived performance or inability to complete a transaction for any reason will invariably cause your users to go elsewhere, with potentially disastrous results to your bottom line.

During the past five years, intelligent server load balancing has emerged as one of the most important technologies in solving the problem of performance and accessibility for e-commerce applications. In its most basic form, the load balancer provides the ability to direct Internet users to the best performing, accessible server. Should one of the servers (or applications on that server) become inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line, while automatically re-routing web users to other functioning servers. In addition, using various load balancing algorithms, an intelligent load balancer can distribute users to servers that offer the best possible performance by dynamically interrogating key server elements such as number of concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilization. To further enhance, and secure, the user experience, more-advanced load balancers also provide SSL acceleration. SSL acceleration in the load balancer enables you to offload the SSL handshake and encryption/decryption processes from the e-commerce application servers. This offloading, dramatically increases the servers performance and decreases the time and costs associated with server’s SSL certificate management.

For years, large corporations and institutions with e-commerce initiatives were able to take advantage of server load balancing technology to significantly improve performance, availability and scalability of their sites. However, at an average cost of over $40,000 per each redundant configuration, deploying intelligent server load balancing required fairly deep pockets. For a small or medium sized business, the high cost of acquisition has placed this technology out of reach.
 

With the introduction of the LoadMaster, KEMP Technologies has radically changed all that. Integrating powerful, stable, full-featured server load balancing with the latest advancements in layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies, KEMP has created an ideal server load balancing appliance for the small and medium e-commerce business.  At a starting price of only $5,990 that includes 1st year support, the LoadMaster family of products bring affordable, advanced e-commerce technology to the SMB.