Panther Express Delivers the Pictures that Make the Sales at PriceMinister.com, top French eCommerce Site

Origin Shielding Improves Site Responsiveness By Slashing Hits to Content Providers’ Database

New York, NY and Paris, France – (July 1, 2008) – Panther Express, (www.pantherexpress.net) a leading global provider of high-performance content delivery services, today announced they have been selected as the content delivery network (CDN) for PriceMinister.com (http://www.priceminister.com), one of Europe’s leading e-commerce sites. Based in France, and serving customers throughout the world, PriceMinister.com is a global online marketplace for connecting buyers and sellers. PriceMinister.com is the second most popular e-commerce site in France and in the top 15 of all French websites overall.

With over 8 million members, PriceMinister.com is an online marketplace for books, CDs, DVDs and games, electronic goods, childcare, fashion, home and garden, automobiles and many other products. Every month, over 30 million people visit the site to buy and sell. Currently there are over 120 million products listed on the site, each with their own graphics and images. Panther delivers those images and graphics.

First launched in 2001, PriceMinister.com has worked with some of the world’s biggest and most well known content delivery networks. In January 2008, they decided to move to Panther Express to smoothly and reliably deliver the site’s graphic elements and millions of product images. They also needed a CDN that could scale and provide extremely reliable, fast delivery through Europe as well as globally.

“By using the Panther Express and its unique Origin Shielding service, we get many fewer requests on our origin servers thereby greatly reducing the load on our database and improving overall site speed and responsiveness,” said Justin Ziegler, co-founder and CTO of PriceMinister.com. “The Panther interface is very simple and easy for our team to use and manage. In addition, we are very impressed by the Panther support team’s responsiveness and professionalism. Whenever we have a question or an issue, they get answers to us quickly.”

“Today, e-commerce is a global phenomenon. It doesn’t matter where you are based, in the United States, in France, or on an island somewhere, you must be sure your content delivery network provides consistent high quality and reliability worldwide,” said Gad Stanislas, Vice President - International of Panther. “PriceMinister.com recognizes that a CDN has to deliver more than just high performance and competitive pricing – they need to provide worldwide connectivity, an easy to use management interface as well as a network architecture that minimizes the requests on the content provider’s origin servers.”

Panther Express Shielding Service

When users make a request to a cache that does not have the object, the cache makes an HTTP request back to the origin web server. By using the Shielding Service, this request is instead first directed to the Shield POP, rather than going directly to the origin web server. Reducing the load on an origin server eliminates the need for capital investment for larger origin servers. Panther Express Shielding can also improve performance because the Shield caches have a proportionately large amount of provisioned bandwidth and are usually closer to POPs than the origin. Shielding also provides redundancy as objects are stored in the cache and will be delivered, even if the origin is down.