Investment in a cache is usually easy to justify:
- Where bandwidth saving is a key driver and extra bandwidth is moderately expensive or worse, a quick calculation demonstrates the benefit in simple cash terms. Rapid payback often makes it a no-brainer.
- If user experience is the issue rather than bandwidth per se, then calculating the benefits in money terms is more complicated, but a compelling case based on other measures is often obvious.
Bandwidth savings translate directly into financial benefits as they allow you to a) use less bandwidth on a metered connection, b) delay bandwidth upgrades. In each case, to calculate savings you’d need to estimate the Hit Rate – the amount of your traffic that you could expect to cache.
Say you use 10Gb per month at a cost of $500 per Gb, so your monthly cost is $5000.
You estimate that 30% of your content is cacheable so:
Savings = $5000 x (30/100) = $1500 per month.
With CACHEBOX, you’d see payback in just a few months and save $18,000 per year thereafter.
When user experience is the key driver, there will often be metrics which establish compelling reasons for investment.
In an enterprise, with drastically increased download speeds you’ll see enhanced employee productivity, spend less time dealing with bandwidth related support issues and improve your user satisfaction rate.
And if your business premises are open to customers (like hotels, casinos or any means of transport), fast internet connection can give you a big competitive advantage.