Earth Networks provides consumers and businesses weather and atmospheric data. Millions of users turn to the company’s WeatherBug products, which include mobile and desktop apps and the website www.weatherbug.com.

Earth Networks uses a CDN so that they can provide dynamic and personalized web based content quickly to their users with very low latency and high performing response times. Specifically, they need to be able to provide local information to the end user, in near real time, and need a CDN that allows them to adjust things like time to live, query strings, and cookie information so that they can pass all that information back to the origin to pull just what the user needs.

“As a provider of weather information at the neighborhood level, there’s no way we could use a CDN that did not provide us with both dynamic content and the ability to optimize under things such as query strings, cookies and low TTLS. Our use case spans the entire array of features that CloudFront provides,” says Andy Rosenbaum, Director of Web and Desktop Development at Earth Networks - WeatherBug. “One of the challenges we had with our previous CDN is that we needed to have code written that was specific to that CDN, which caused our development costs to be higher. We were able to achieve the same level of performance without having to write customized code. We’re seeing about a 50% reduction in cost with an equivalent baseline in performance that we saw with our previous CDN and ultimately we’re anticipating about 20% reduction in Amazon EC2 origin instances under CloudFront.”