Cloud optimizer Akamai Technologies, today revealed that HauteLook, the Nordstrom-acquired, member-exclusive shopping website, has been leveraging their Dynamic Site Accelerator Services.  This is a case study in HauteLook’s behind-the-scenes work, utilizing Akamai in order to be consistent, fast and secure in delivering content to its 4 million user base from the US and Canada. HauteLook’s service revolves around the delivery of special offers featuring some of the world’s top fashion and accessory brands as well as beauty products, kids’ items, home decor, travel packages and local services, in a limited time event.

“Running a speedy retail site and being able to transact at scale is crucial to converting customers in the online retail world,” said Pedro Santos, Chief Strategist, Akamai Technologies. “Especially for retailers like HauteLook, which has a unique business model that attracts high volume of traffic at certain times of the day. It is essential for it to be able to cope with the traffic surges and deliver a fast, reliable site for consumers. Leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator services, HauteLook can handle the unexpected traffic peaks, avoid downtime and ensure quick transactions.”

With such great offers and dramatically growing user-base, HauteLook has always been looking for ways on how to cope up with overwhelming traffic as soon as daily member emails are sent out. Dynamically generated pages, added with traffic swells greatly stresses it LA-based servers.

“We feel Akamai’s expansive infrastructure and advanced technologies are the right choice at the right time,” says Kevin Diamond, Chief Technology Officer, HauteLook. “Akamai has supported us through our amazing growth surge, enabling us to continue delivering a great member experience every day. As we further grow our business, we want our members to have the same site experience as on day one. With Akamai serving our content, members can access the site the second a sale event goes live, find exactly what they want, and check out, easily and quickly.”

Using Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator and platform, HauteLook was able to offload 95% of its content and increase performance without constructing its own infrastructure. In addition, Haute demands for meticulous security in order to protect billing, shipping and other private data. Akamai’s PCI-certified SSL network ensures a PCI-compliant way of managing and delivering data.

Similarly, WeeWorld has also availed of one of Akamai’s offerings, using the Rich Media Accelerator to increase the speed and efficiency of their website. Just like HauteLook, the improvement eventually paid off as statistics show that users are spending more time on the game as pages load faster by up to 30 percent.

On the partnership side, Akamai has recently teamed up with Sony Ericsson. The deal revolves around setting up content delivery networking in order to reach operator networks worldwide. It’s also inked an agreement with Rackspace to create a “one-stop shop” for cloud hosting and acceleration services by fusing Akamai’s CNAMEs, SSL and CDN delivery into Rackspace’s Cloud Files offering.  Akamai has released its State of the Internet Report for Q3 not too long ago. The report is about internet speed statistics based requests received by the network, revealing 533 million unique IPs coming from 235 countries/regions, up by 20% on the same quarter a year back.

HauteLook’s not the only fashion retail site to drive business in the cloud.  See here for a run down of recent cloud developments in this real-time, brand aware and analysis-driven industry.