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Experience Delivery Bandwidth

What is Experience Delivery Bandwidth?

Experience Delivery Bandwidth includes:

  • Request/Response Data

    The cycle originating in a consumer request for content served by the Arc XP Platform and the data returned to that request.

  • Hosted Arc XP platform

    The Arc XP Platform components that service those requests and generate a response, inclusive of PageBuilder Engine services which run on our cloud hosting provider (AWS), and CDN services which run on our cloud delivery provider (Akamai).

This includes all environments and provisioned Installations. And it includes both website bandwidth and photo bandwidth.

Note

Video/Audio content are excluded as they appear under a separate billing category.

Bandwidth used to support platform caching

Extensive caching exists throughout the Hosted Arc XP Platform to optimize performance of the Request/Response cycle. The population and management of those caches can contribute to Experience Delivery Bandwidth usage. The workload and bandwidth used to support caches will vary depending on customer use of the system, the frequency of content updates, and the customer's configuration of cache durations.

Bandwidth incurred by requests served by our CDN

Arc leverages a CDN to deliver response data to consumers around the globe with high reliability and speed. Examples of content delivered in such responses include:

  • Rendered Web Page Data from Page Builder Engine (HTML/JS/CSS/…)

  • Customer static resources (i.e: fonts, favicon, svg files…)

  • API Response Data (Page Builder HTTP API calls to Content Sources, outboundfeeds, Arc Subscriptions, …)

  • Alt-origin (experience hosted outside of Arc XP, but served by Arc XP CDN)

“Midgress” Bandwidth

Our CDN includes a tree structure of physical delivery nodes to cache content with geographic proximity to consumer requests to optimize delivery speed of a response. Bandwidth is consumed in the process of keeping these nodes up to date based on caching configuration, content update frequency, and the geographic/time distribution of consumer requests for content. Further details on the caching within Arc XP and our CDN is contained at Caching at Arc XP in our technical documentation.

The industry term that refers to the bandwidth required to service these nodes is Midgress. Midgress traffic is part of what is required for the Arc XP Platform to deliver responses and is included in the Experience delivery Bandwidth charge.

Alt-Origin (non-Arc source)

Customers can also have their own non-Arc content sources - referred to as “Alt-Origin”. Although this content is hosted outside of Arc XP, it is still delivered through the Arc XP CDN, allowing customers to benefit from the same security features, such as bot and crawler detection. Alt-Origin traffic is metered and billed the same way as Arc provided origin content under the Experience Delivery Bandwidth model.

Common use cases for Alt-Origin:

  • Legacy/Multiple CMS

  • Archival content that is no longer updated but does not require migration to Arc XP

How to Decrease Experience Delivery Bandwidth

Fluctuations in Experience Delivery Bandwidth usage can occur for a variety of operational and configuration reasons. While some factors (like unexpected traffic spikes) are unpredictable, others can be optimized through proactive configuration, caching strategies, and content optimization. The following best practices can help reduce overall bandwidth consumption without sacrificing performance or reliability.

  1. Manage and Mitigate Traffic Spikes

    • Monitor traffic patterns: Use CDN log delivery to analyze traffic and identify when spikes occur and their root causes (e.g., bot activity).

    • Utilize edge integration framework and delivery targeting for available traffic control features.

  2. Optimize Asset Sizes

    • Always use Image Resizer and optimize asset sizes used on the page.

    • Lazy-load non-critical content: Defer the loading of below-the-fold or non-essential assets until needed by the user.

    • Audit static resources: Remove unused fonts, scripts, or stylesheets to reduce payload size on every request.

  3. Optimize your PageBuilder bundle and pages

  4. Enable and Fine-Tune Content Compression

    • Optimize your content sources output: Use include/exclude fields within the Content API or filter content source output to only the required data in order to reduce the resulting HTML site.

  5. Tune Caching and Content Refresh Strategies

    • Increase cache TTL (Time-To-Live): Configure longer cache lifetimes for content that doesn’t change frequently to reduce repeated origin fetches.

  6. Optimize Alt-Origin and External Integrations

    • Ensure caching parity: Apply caching headers to Alt-Origin responses to prevent extra transit through midgress layers to retrieve the same content repeatedly from the alt-origin.

  7. Continuous Monitoring and Benchmarking

    • Use Arc XP analytics and CDN reports to monitor bandwidth trends over time.

    • Review configuration regularly as content strategies, traffic patterns, and user behavior evolve.

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