How Akamai Works
On all the major media sites, you’ve likely noticed that most, if not all, of the images are coming from “akamai” servers. Akamai is basically a company which provides media caching throughout the world for companies. When you connect to an “akamai-enabled” site, the images are actually pulled from a server that is geographically near to you – Akamai has thousands of such servers for this purpose. The result is load-balancing on a global scale, and theoretically quicker response times for visitors. Here’s a more in-depth article, and an interview with the VP of R&D of Akamai.
1:04pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
