WebMARA offers unique caching mechanisms that enable caching for content for the top traffic consuming services like software updates, leading video portals, CDNs and filehosters. This feature is especially tailored to save valuable bandwidth, preventing the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade. Usually customers achieve at least 30% bandwidth savings, most acutually have between 40% and 50%. Users will also benefit from faster response times and thus, will have a better browsing experience.

Microsoft Windows Update Caching

The automatic Microsoft Windows Update mechanism can cause massive amounts of traffic and consume valuable bandwidth. One approach for companies is using a dedicated server with deployed Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) which retrieves the updates from the Microsoft server and distributes them among all clients. WebMARA has a builtin option to cache Microsoft updates when requested by the first client. Each subsequent request is then served with the cached content, which reduces the consumed bandwidth and traffic dramatically. Usually WebMARA can serve 90% and more of the Windows Update traffic directly from the cache without contacting the Internet.

Antivirus Update Caching

All Microsoft Windows installations today should run an updated Antivirus service because of security reasons. This means that almost all clients regularly download automatic Antivirus pattern updates. WebMARA has builtin support for caching those updates which helps to reduce traffic and bandwidth a lot.

Video and media streaming portals

Video portals and media streaming portals are one of the main reasons for the increased traffic volume during last years. They are becoming more and more popular and with a growing number of users, the traffic caused by such portals represents a continually increasing amount of the total HTTP traffic. Most of the content delivered by such portals is dynamic content and caching such content does not work out of the box. Portals like youtube.com specifically developed techniques that prevent their videos from being effectively distributed by caches. Opening the same video several times results in completely different URLs and URL parameters. To be capable of caching such dynamic content, WebMARA uses special rules to recognize that these URLs belong to the same video. WebMARA fully supports caching different resolutions of the same video (including HD resolutions) and skipping parts of the video.

Content Delivery Networks

A CDN is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to more efficiently deliver content like applications, media streams or software to users. In order to maximize access to the requested resource, the server with the fastest response time is chosen. A CDN is also capable of avoiding a bottleneck near a server by dynamically balancing clients to server with little load. Content Delivery Networks impose a heavy increase of traffic, thus WebMARA's unique feature to cache such content provides great benefit.

One-Click-Hosters, Sharehosters and Filehosters

More and more users today share large files using so called One-Click-Hosters, Sharehosters or Filehosters like Rapidshare or similar services. Those services actively try to prevent caching data from them, so special rules are needed for each service to overwrite caching control headers and modify URLs and/or URL parameters to map different URLs to the same content.

Examples of supported Services

MARA Systems spends considerable efforts to implement caching support for all the major sites and services in order to optimize traffic and bandwidth savings.

The following table is only a small part of our long list of services that have full caching support because of our special rules. None of that sites would support caching without those special rules that alter the caching headers and modify the URLs and/or URL parameters internally to map different URLs to the same content.

Custom Rules

We make sure that our customers profit from optimal caching performance. Our detailed statistics and reporting features in WebMARA allow our customers and us to check the caching performance of the TOP sites consuming most traffic. If we find sites that are not supported by our special rules yet that consume considerable traffic, MARA Systems will add support for that sites if possible to improve caching performance.