Leighton, who is also chief scientist for the Cambridge, Mass. content delivery network (CDN) provider, will start his new gig January 1, 2013. Last spring, Sagan announced his plans to step down as CEO at the end of 2013. Both Leighton and Sagan will remain on the board and Sagan will stay on as a senior strategy advisor, the company said.

In a statement, Martin Coyne II, the lead director on Akamai’s board said:

 ”When we began evaluating our options for the next CEO of Akamai, our objective was simply to have the best possible leadership team in place for continued growth and innovation in the years ahead, and that’s what we’re doing with Tom’s appointment. We conducted an exhaustive review of the company’s strategy and opportunities as we evaluated a broad range of potential candidates. We are confident that naming Tom is the best and most natural evolution of management responsibility at Akamai.”

The company also promoted two executive vice presidents. Rick McConnell is now president of products and development and Robert Hughes was named president of worldwide operations.  Both will report to Leighton.

Akamai claims a roster of blue chip customers including the BBC, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard which also resells Akamai’s CDN as part of its public cloud.

As the nature of web content  has changed, Akamai has had to adapt to handle more dynamic content and has made a series of acquisitions towards that end. Early this year it bought Blaze for its web site optimization expertise just a few months after purchasing CDN rival Contendo. No one expects that M&A  strategy to change.

Akamai competes with Limelight Networks and Level 3 in CDN as well as an array of smaller, more specialized players like Yottaa. Last but not least, public  cloud giant Amazon is both a customer and a competitor to Akamai. Amazon offers its own CloudFront CDN service but utilizes Akamai CDN to speed content delivery around the world.

Just a few weeks ago Akamai and AT&T inked a deal under which AT&T will deploy Akamai CDN servers at the edge of its network and resell Akamai services — in effect bowing out of its own CDN business.

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The company set up its monitoring service to track performance and availability of NBC, ABC, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, C-SPAN and other news sites as well as Twitter and Facebook from the Friday before election day onward. The monitors ran IE9 to mimic end-user experience from a half-dozen North American cities. The monitor visited each site every 5 minutes and recorded what a person would have experienced if she had been clicking on the site at that time. The monitors captured and logged HTTP errors, connection failures and “excessively slow” page load times, according to a Yottaa blog post.

And boy, some of those load times got extremely and excessively slow as election day wore on. From 7 pm ET until Wednesday 2 am ET, most of the news sites “came to a halt,” according to Yottaa. Some “consistently took as long as 50 seconds to 60 seconds to load.”

I can attest to that. Passing through the Charlotte, NC airport at around 9 pm, I was unable to get updated news from any of the major web sites, including CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post. In fact, I ended up relying on text updates from friends who were glued to their sets in Boston. (The other alternative would have been to belly up to the bar and watch Fox News, but we all have our limits.)

The election took its toll on Twitter and Facebook as well. These pages usually load in less than 5 seconds but on Tuesday night, President Obama’s Facebook page’s load times slowed to 25 seconds after 11 pm ET and didn’t recover till after 1 am ET.

Really poor showing by major news sites

For the five days up to and including election day, the monitor found 3,800 total errors — things like HTTP errors, connection time outs etc — 80 percent of those occurred on Tuesday. The average increase in errors across all sites from Monday to Tuesday was more than 500 percent, but the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Fox News each showed increases of more than 1,500 percent.

And the winners are …

Based on its monitors, Yottaa deemed C-SPAN and CNN as the most consistent and reliable sites across the board. Each had its share of errors and performance issues but they paled in comparison to those of other media sites.

Of course, I’m sure Cambridge, Mass.-based Yottaa, which offers web site performance optimization services would love to sell them some technology to correct these issues.

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Yottaa CEO Coach Wei.

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup which aims to speed up website performance, netted $9 million in Series B funding from initial investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures as well as some new-but-unnamed backers. That brings total venture funding to $13 million for the two-year-old company.

Yottaa, which offers both website performance optimization and security services, targets both small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises. SMBs often don’t do a lot to speed up their website performance simply because many of the available solutions — from Cisco or F5 Networks — are too pricey or difficult to implement, according to Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “In SMBs, we compete with ‘do nothing,’” Wei said in an interview Monday.

In enterprises, it faces off against traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) from Akamai and Limelight. As GigaOM reported last spring, Yottaa uses third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services to deliver its optimization services.

The new funding will help the company — which already claims good customer momentum — build more. Since Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer launched in October, 2011, the company’s site has drawn 100 million unique visitors. Some 80,000 web sites have used Yottaa’s services to date, Wei said. Under the company’s freemium model — site monitoring is free but optimization and security services are not . Yottaa does not disclose how many customers are paying.

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Case in point: Yottaa. The web-optimization startup, which also launched its own CDN service in March, is transitioning its network into a hybrid model of cloud-based and physical servers after launching in the cloud exclusively. It’s a significant shift considering the company was actually a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge and touted its cloud-based approach when the company launched last April.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud-only model has served Yottaa well. Its network is actually spread across multiple providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Voxel, and that distribution helped the company reroute traffic to avoid any major downtime during last year’s four-day AWS outage. And even as it moves to a hybrid model, the cloud still has benefits. “We can literally scale to hundreds of thousands of machines in a matter of hours,” said Yottaa Founder and CEO Coach Wei.

As the company grew, however, cost, performance and security issues meant Yottaa had to decrease its cloud dependency:

• Cost: According Wei, it’s easy to get started in the cloud — you can spin up only as many servers as you need at any given time and don’t have to invest in 100,000 physical servers to match Akamai’s architecture — but “when you get to a certain scale, it’s actually not cost-effective anymore.” For Yottaa, which is serving 100 million unique visitors across its network every month for more than 80,000 web sites, that time has already come. Actually, Wei said, Yottaa always planned to move to a hybrid architecture, but even still he was surprised at how much the cloud could cost. Before he started Yottaa, he’d never thought about paying a million dollars a year to AWS.
• Performance: The performance trade-offs in the cloud can be problematic, too. Wei said network performance is the biggest problem for Yottaa, as it’s typically about 50 percent slower in the cloud and variable at that. You never know what type of performance you’ll get at any given time. If someone else is using a lot of bandwidth, your service might suffer. And while some cloud providers throttle bandwidth at 100 Mbps per user, Wei said, “at the high end of the scale, that’s just way too low.”
• Security: Wei notes all sorts of security problems with cloud computing, but the major one is the inability to use tried-and-true physical appliances for security. Not only do physical appliances provide a lot in terms of traffic-monitoring and load-balancing, but they can store thousands of IP addresses for SSL certificates on a single box. A cloud provider, Wei said, might only give you a handful of IP addresses.

With its new hybrid model, Yottaa still leverages the cloud when necessary — like when it would be faster serving an Australian end-user through a cloud provider there than a physical server in the United States — but it targets physical resources whenever possible. Its network now includes cloud and/or physical servers in 24 cities across the globe.

Yottaa isn’t alone in its transition to a hybrid architecture after a cloud-heavy beginning. Zynga, for one, famously reversed its AWS-to-internal-cloud usage ratio from 80-20 to 20-80. Fellow gaming startup Digital Chocolate also moved a good portion of its operations back onto internal infrastructure. At a larger scale, you see similar requirements of cost, performance and customization driving web platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to build their own data centers.

Of course, for every company (or several companies) that decides to switch from a cloud-centric architecture, there’s a Netflix or Animoto that decides to stay all in the cloud. It’s really a matter of knowing what’s best for your business. We’ll talk all about ideal infrastructure choices at our Structure conference in June, which includes top executives from Zynga, Amazon and Netflix among others.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Claveirole.

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That being said, the company promises it can cut page-load times in half, even for customers already using CDNs or load balancers. It does this by intelligently routing jobs across its “global elastic multi-cloud network … using more than 100 techniques such as domain sharding, CSS spriting and content delivery network (CDN) balancing.”

I have reached out to Yottaa to confirm its cloud providers and locations and will update this post when I hear back.

Update: Yottaa uses 11 different cloud providers for Yottaa Optimizer, including Amazon Web Services. During the recent outage, a company spokesperson told me, Yottaa was able to reroute AWS operations to other clouds to avoid any lengthy downtime. It plans to automate this capability for customers in the future.

The company also uses AWS to host its Yottaa Insight service, which tests and monitors website performance and provides suggestions to improve load speed. That product won Yottaa a spot as a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

Yottaa’s service highlights one of the big sweet spots for cloud computing, which is the ability for startups to compete with CDNs and other service providers without having to build their own infrastructure. By writing smart software and leveraging cloud providers’ already-built infrastructure, companies such as Yottaa can keep their overhead down, which results a lower cost service for customers, too.

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