ReadWriteWeb

Last week, my colleague David Strom reported on the latest annual "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai. The report showed that while Americans are finally experiencing faster average broadband speeds on a quarter-by-quarter basis, those speeds only began eclipsing those of Sweden in the second half of 2010, and still have about 40% of gap to close if it hopes to achieve par with Japan - which, at this rate, it might do in about a decade.

If Web connection speeds are, as Google has said so often in touting the performance of its Chrome Web browser, essentially a product of end user perception, then perhaps any technology that applies itself solely to improving that perception will be at least as worthy of investment, if not more so, than investing in the Internet backbone itself. That's the conclusion Akamai itself has reached in its buyout of two-year-old Web front-end optimization service Blaze.

The speed at which a Website loads is paramount to maintaining a positive user experience and, as we learned last year, has a direct impact on the site's organic search rankings on Google.

The search giant's recent beta launch of its Page Speed Service gives us the latest in a long line of products and tools designed to help site owners boost page load speed. In what is by no means a comprehensive list, we've outlined a few such tools worth checking out.

CDN services provider Cotendo announced today what they claim is the world's first purpose-built Mobile Acceleration Suite. Designed to specifically eliminate latencies found on mobile broadband networks, the suite will be able to take applications and tailor the content to any mobile device without customers have to rewrite their applications for each device.

Last week Infinite Apple posted screenshots of what writer Paul Paliath believes are evidence that Apple iCloud is using Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services to store content. GigaOM ran an article after consulting three networking and cloud computing experts who concluded that the data Paliath posted wasn't sufficient to prove that iCloud was using AWS or Azure.

This week, Paliath posted a raw dump (with some redactions) of some tests conducted with beta versions of iOS5, and conclude that Apple is at least using Azure as a content-delivery network (CDN).

Security company Imperva's SMB spin-off company Incapsula opens its service to the public today. Incapsula provides a content delivery network (CDN) style service, aimed at speeding up websites, and a hosted Web application firewall (WAF). Previously, Imperva's WAF product SecureSphere was out of reach for smaller organizations. By offering a distributed, cloud-based service, Incapsula is able to offer prices starting at $50 a month. There is also a free plan for non-commercial websites.

The first 100 ReadWriteWeb readers to sign-up for the service can try out the service for free until the end of the year.

Incapsula will compete most directly with CloudFlare, which offers similar security-as-a-service and CDN-like features. CloudFlare's basic plan is free, and it's pro plan - which includes a hosted WAF - costs $20 a month. Incapsula will also compete with Dasient, which offers a security-as-a-service that monitors and alerts site owners when sites are compromised.

Everybody knows that having a fast Website is important, especially now that Google officially factors a site's load time into its search ranking score.

It's simple enough to run a site speed test with Yahoo's YSlow plugin or Google's Web Accelerator, but how actionable the resulting reports are depends on how your Website was built and more importantly, what kind of development resources you have at your disposal.

Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offering. Today, they unveiled the beta version of that service, named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery.