In 2021, as the Covid pandemic that pushed e-commerce into the dominant way of shopping, it became clear that existing challenges to e-commerce persist: site availability and speed. The new levels of demand placed on e-commerce platforms and websites challenged their resilience, taxed the patience of consumers, and ultimately changed the way e-commerce companies think about the technology they rely on to power always-on shopping for the nonstop, 24/7 nature of online retail post-Covid.

Multi-CDN strategies have changed the content delivery landscape, making it more competitive and comprehensive as things aren't limited to just one CDN. In the old days, content providers turned to a single CDN and demanded high-performance content delivery, and when the CDN inevitably ran into a problem, the content provider would move to another, and then another, before finally recognizing -- as the entire industry has -- that a multi-CDN strategy makes the most sense for delivering the best end-user experience.

They say you can’t be ‘up’ all the time, but when it comes to business-critical websites, you kind of have to be up… all the time. There is no foolproof way to avoid downtime completely, but knowing that it’s expensive - both in upfront costs (immediate costs of resource allocation and customer frustration) and in the longer term (revenue and loss of customers and their trust) - is ample incentive to avoid it at all costs. 

Varnish High Availability (VHA) is a high-performance content replicator for Varnish Plus. Using VHA with a group of Varnish Plus servers ensures that the cached objects will be efficiently replicated between caches when first fetched from the backend. This both provides higher performance to the client, and minimizes backend traffic.