The Rise of the Dynamic Web

By Joaquin Ruiz

As recent as a couple of years ago, the Web was markedly different. Then, business traffic dominated the Web, and users were online to find information (largely from sites with static content) and engage in e-commerce. That’s completely changed now thanks to a combination of forces: consumer dominance, speed of access and mobility, and the rise of dynamic content, applications and activity.

This year, for the first time, consumers outpaced business users on the Internet by a factor of 2.5 (and expected to be 3.2 by next year). This dynamic Web is more global than ever, driven by the social topology building up in different geographies. Of the 2.2 billion people that Forrester projects will be online by 2013 43% will be in Asia. 

What are these consumers doing online? They’re social networking, communicating, and finding entertainment – in effect, creating more social links and data output than ever.  

Speed and Mobility 

Access to the Web is also changing. The rise of high-speed portability platforms (i.e., mobile communications) means consumers have even more ways to use the Web, more often. In the 12 months prior to January 2009, 63.2 million people in the US accessed the Web on their mobile devices, with 22.3 million people doing so on a daily basis – this in itself more than doubled from 2008 when just 10.8 million were accessing the mobile Web daily. Mobile traffic is expected to double year each year through 2013,bolstered in part by increasing adoption of smartphones. 

It’s no surprise then that there’s been a massive increase in Web data – and this will only continue to grow exponentially. Global global IP traffic will exceed two-thirds of a zettabyte (667 exabytes) by 2013 and video will comprise 90% of consumer traffic. 

Rethinking the Web Architecture 

The majority of websites (65%) is built on the LAMP stack, Ruby or Java and, unfortunately, on Web architectures that simply don’t scale out easily. These changes in Internet user behavior, usage, and traffic are straining websites. Throwing servers at the problem only creates additional problems and increased infrastructure costs. Ultimately, we need to rethink the Web architecture. 

Gear6 is a caching company, so clearly we believe intelligent caching is a foundation of the dynamic Web. We’ll be hosting a webinar next week to talk more about the rise of the dynamic Web and how web businesses can get ahead of it with a new Web scale architecture - with memcached.