(Adapted from an article within Business Today March 2010, Newsmakers section, page 20 and 21. Originally written by Catherine Yong)

In the Web hosting industry, catering to a still nascent broadband landscape, there is not much difference from one hosting company to the next. The Malaysian broadband scene was expected to bloom, but hadn't. As a result, the local Web hosting industry portrays this as a lacklustre performance.

However, this did not stop Aflexi's CEO, Wong Whei Meng, from being strongly committed with his plans for content delivery networks. With a pre-seed grant of MYR 150,000 from Cradle Fund Sdn. Bhd., he went about making his dream happen.

Whei intends to place more awareness about content delivery networks. "We are bringing what can be called a niche technology to the mass Web hosting market, so more people can use it. We are trying to make it a standard in the Web hosting industry", he says.

Wikipedia article link on content delivery networks.

"Traditionally, when people do hosting, they have it all in one location. I term it as traditional, single location hosting. That's the way things are being done now", he continues. Whei adds that Aflexi's technology allows content to be distributed from different locations, by replicating data on demand. "Just imagine if the data is placed just next to you, it reaches you faster."

With instant gratification being more prevalent these days, Web surfers are demanding ever faster access to Website content, and the current way of doing things just isn't going to cut it anymore. If before we were happy with waiting for four seconds, now, we want our Web pages to load in two seconds. This poses the question: "With no technological breakthrough, how are you going to achieve that? It is either you minimise your content or have some technology in place to speed up traffic flow. So this is where CDN, we forsee, is going to help."

Once businesses start to have online presence on the World Wide Web, geographical borders cease to exist, and practically the entire world becomes the target market. Being the first to be eyeballed globally can make all the difference to a business' success or failure.

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