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When user experience is at risk, Tier 1 providers can help ON THE WEB, experience is everything. If you really want to connect with your customers, focus on creating the best online experience. According to Web guru and author Jakob Nielsen, "slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability." A recent Zona Research report showed that as much as $73 million in e-commerce sales could be lost as a result of slow page performance (see www.zonaresearch.com/promotion/needforspeed/index.htm).
If you're serious about your e-business and you're located at a Tier 2 co-location center or you're hosting your own servers with restricted bandwidth, think again. Consider moving to a Tier 1 facility -- and fast. Folks remember slow sites, and they don't go back for a checkup. Tier 1 providers offer many other benefits. Typically, SLAs (service-level agreements) include 99.9 percent uptime guarantees, impressive security, continuous and clean power, and protection from fire, earthquakes, and other disasters. The impressive power of a Tier 1 provider is its backbone. Tier 1 providers are rock-solid. They provide you clear passage while other providers send you across the bumpy back roads. A Tier 1 provider takes you from the West Coast to the East Coast in one big hop, while others pass you along to various locations across the United States. Equally impressive are a Tier 1 provider's private peering arrangements. When most of the Internet ran across the bogged-down National Science Foundation network, NAPs (Network Access Points) became the place for the new ISPs to peer with one another and exchange traffic. It wasn't long before the NAPs bogged down. As a result, big ISPs started to privately peer with each other. A few years ago, co-location centers with extensive private peering arrangements emerged. These facilities would peer with two to five other Tier 1 providers. InfoWorld.com's co-location provider supports 420 peering arrangements. Our traffic travels across AboveNet's backbone and eventually enters a private peer at a local ISP. A Tier 2 provider is not privately peered with more than two other Tier 1 providers, so the traffic you generate might travel across stuffy public networks. As a result, the user experience on sites using a Tier 2 provider can easily suffer. Private Tier 1 networks, on the other hand, minimize the amount of traffic traveling across congested public networks. Thinking about streaming or more rich media? There's no need to install additional lines. It's easy to get bandwidth on demand for one-time events that require more than your normal usage. You don't pay for what you don't use. Best of all, you can save money: Tier 1 providers have better prices. Next time, I'll share what it takes to make the move and what we learned after the fact. Laura Wonnacott is vice president of InfoWorld.com. Share your thoughts with her at laura_wonnacott@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceNetwork/System ManagementServersMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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