The scientific journal Nature recently alerted its readers that most web surfers make their decisions about a website within fifty milliseconds. If they can’t find what they want in that first blink of an eye, they’ll often move to some other site. And if your site doesn’t load that fast, those potential customers might never come back.

That’s why we activated Internap's FCP System on our network in January. Since we added this feature to our network, it has shaved more than half a second from the time it takes for data to move from our data center to web browsers all over the world.

The Flow Control Platform (FCP) sits back and watches all the traffic that flows between our servers and your web surfers. Like your favorite television traffic reporter, it checks every possible route for speed and reliability. When it sees data getting clogged up on the way to your readers and customers, it starts redirecting that information to a faster connection.

If you have ever been frustrated when a hosting company told you that a technical problem was at the user’s end, the FCP can help you. It even watches out for network issues on systems that we don’t control, so it can route traffic around them when trouble strikes. By sending small test packets of data across the web all day long, the FCP can anticipate trouble and send your information down the right pipelines when your site visitors demand it.

Your customers don’t know about packets, routing, or data loss. More importantly, they don’t care. They just want to see your site as fast as possible, and that’s where the FCP comes in. Many “bargain” hosting companies only have one direct connection to the rest of the Internet. When one of their sites gets too busy, it can feel like a school bus is blocking your driveway while you’re already late to work. With multiple backbone connections to our world-class data center, congestion at one route never means that your viewers wait for your data.

All day long, the FCP monitors, measures, and adjusts the traffic running from our systems to end-users. Meanwhile, your customers’ ISPs use a system called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, to monitor the traffic that arrives on their networks.

Without FCP, a service provider’s BGP system does the best it can to move traffic through the network. When FCP and BGP work together, though, your customers experience the fastest possible connections – and you get all the credit.

All day long, the FCP watches traffic as it leaves our network to reach your site visitors at their homes, in their offices, and even on their mobile phones. Every time one of your customers visits your site, the FCP learns how quickly it can get the right data to their terminal.

When the FCP finds a faster way to reach your end users, it quietly and quickly sends their traffic over that alternate route. Your customer never notices a thing, except that your website is always on and always fast.

When BGP and FCP work together, web surfers enjoy fast, reliable streams of data, images, voice, and video. To factor out the effects of slow dial-up connections, let’s use some examples that show how fast our system can get data to an ISPs router.

In our first example, we can send data to a surfer on the BACOM network via two excellent pipelines, Cogent and Internap. Though Internap tends to be faster for this particular route, they’ve got a sudden problem with slowness at their link to BACOM. Because FCP knows about this problem in advance, it sends the data through Cogent and saves 62 milliseconds. That’s more than the magic number of 50 milliseconds in the Nature article!

Next, let’s examine a connection to a surfer at Level3. FCP makes an unconventional decision to send traffic through an extra router, something that older systems would avoid. This shortcut ends up shaving 36 milliseconds off the transit time.

Finally, as one surfer wants to connect from LACNIC, FCP knows about some temporary congestion on the route. FCP sends the traffic down an alternate path and saves a whopping 469 milliseconds. Without FCP on the job, that surfer might have given up on a site, even though the congestion was closer to their ISP.

Of course, FCP continues to monitor congestion points like these all day long. That way, when they clear up, FCP can start sending data down the most efficient routes at any given time.

Before we added FCP, our network was already fast, reliable, and affordable. Today, with FCP in place, our systems proactively route around trouble spots on the web. When you host your website or your application with us, you’ll avoid spending time dealing with complaints about a slow server. Instead, you’ll be able to focus on all the customers you’re attracting and keeping because of your site’s fast, seamless surfing experience.

In the early days of the web, a sophisticated system like this would cost thousands of dollars every month to implement. Today, you can take advantage of FCP on your own website for as little as $8 per month.

You no longer have to sacrifice quality to meet your budget. As that Nature study shows, even a tiny lag time can put a dent in your long-term profits. Put the power of our network to work for you, and you’ll enjoy an effortless web hosting experience that expands with your business.