Dear Log,
Why do various web sites use Akamai to host their graphics and stuff? I started out putting Akamai in my URL kill-list, but I get too many false hits -- like Washington Post pages that become unreadable because the background image is hosted off of Akamai, and which my ad proxy therefore replaces with a black image.
Is hosting images with Akamai really worth the bother?
I haven't worked on many sites that needed to use Akamai, but quite honestly in a number of cases it really is worth it. What they (very basically) do is provide you with bandwidth. You store your static data at their facilities (there are plenty of ways of automating that) and they just provide the servers for them. If I remember correctly, an interesting part of their service is that they can choose the server that's closest to the requestor.
That being said, I've seen some companies turn to Akamai when they could have served their entire site from much, much less, and of course for much, much less.
