A content delivery network that can make image and media-heavy web pages load in seconds.

Hostway Corporation, a web hosting provider, today announced the release of Edge Caching, a content delivery network that makes image and media-heavy web pages load in seconds.

The company claims that studies show people simply clicking away from a web site that takes more than a few seconds to load. Edge Caching improves the user experience by speeding content to the visitor's browser. It is supposedly good for online stores with hundreds of product images, multimedia-heavy web sites and social media sites with many user-generated profiles.

The Edge Caching content delivery network is a group of servers strategically deployed in data centers across four continents, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The servers work together to determine the fastest path to speed the data to the user's screen.

For example, without Edge Caching, a web page displaying multiple product images might take 3 to 30 seconds to load, depending on the distance between the user and the server. That's even if it is sent over a high-speed Internet connection. The same page using Edge Caching will load in less than 0.5 seconds, regardless of the distance from server to user. That time differential may be all it takes to lose a prospective customer to the dreaded back button.

"User expectations for immediate access to greater content on the Web continue to increase. Hostway's Edge Caching offering is our answer to the market demand for the technology to meet these expectations," said John Enright, Hostway's vice president of sales and marketing.