Panther Express and studiVZ Team Up To Deliver Germany’s Busiest Social Networking Sites

Panther Origin Shielding Service Helps studiVZ Connect Many Millions of University and Public School Students and Graduates

New York, NY – (September 2, 2008) – Panther Express (http://www.pantherexpress.net), a leading global provider of high-performance content delivery services, today announced they have been selected to provide content delivery services for studiVZ (http://www.studivz.net), the largest social networking site in Europe with over 5 million members. studiVZ provides three social networking services; schülerVZ (www.schülerVZ.net) targeted to elementary and secondary school students; studiVZ (www.studiVZ.net) targeted to university students and meinVZ (www.meinVZ.net) targeted to graduates and everyone else not in school or at university.

Launched less than two years ago, the schülerVZ and studiVZ sites currently generate over 12 billion page views a month and over 55,000 requests a second. In February of 2008, studiVZ decided to migrate away from their original content delivery network. After comparing performance from the world’s leading CDN companies, they choose to utilize Panther Express’s content delivery network for all three of their platforms.

“We met with most of the top content delivery networks to see what they could provide,” said Marcus Riecke, CEO of studiVZ. “In addition to Panther Express’s outstanding performance and ability to scale to meet our rapidly growing member base, we were very impressed with Panther’s amazing customer support and helpful business attitude. They were knowledgeable, responsive, and cared about our business. When we had questions, Panther’s Europe based team was able to get us answers within hours, rather than days or weeks. We trust Panther Express to deliver. ”

Panther CDN’s Shielding, Origin Protection and Cache Hit Ratio features are very important to studiVZ. When users make a request to a cache that does not have the object, the cache makes an HTTP request back to the origin web server. By using the Panther CDN Shielding Service, this request is directed to the Shield POP first, rather than going directly to the origin web server. This greatly reduces the load on the origin server thus reducing the need for capital investment in larger origin servers. This service also provides a better and more responsive end user experience.

“The migration from studiVZ’s previous CDN to Panther Express went very smoothly and without any problems,” said Gad Stanislas, Vice President International for Panther Express. “Panther CDN now successfully serves 100 per cent of studiVZ’s static content – which is projected to grow rapidly as studiVZ grows in popularity. Unlike many other CDNs, the Panther CDN architecture can cost-effectively handle large amounts of ongoing traffic as well as unexpected spikes.”