The Internet has provided an immense number of opportunities for companies to offer services to the public. Each opportunity requires a server to perform services for a user. As companies grow their networks of servers to host their application programs, the costs of obtaining the servers and maintaining the servers rises dramatically.
A typical company is not set up to provide efficient Internet access to its servers. Those companies do not have the presence in the Internet to serve users in different geographical areas in a manner that provides consistent response times.
Further, demand for a company's services typically varies as time goes by. The biggest risk to a company is to invest in a large network of servers only to find that the demand for the application programs on those servers was not up to predictions. On the other hand, the popularity for a company's application program may far exceed the capacity of the company's servers leaving users staring at their computer monitors waiting for a response from the company's servers.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers have servers distributed across the Internet. They have been providing “utility computing” in an “on-demand” manner for years. The CDNs are one of the first Internet-based examples of a computing service that is priced based on consumption and provisioned based on need. In a CDN, content is deployed to more servers as demand for the content grows and the content is removed from those servers as demand shrinks. Likewise, the price changes with the number of locations and the volume of content distributed. However, the CDN does not have the facilities to host a company's application programs.
What is desired is to be able to provide a system that has the Internet presence of a CDN in a network of servers combined with the ability to dynamically distribute a company's application programs to servers in the network. This would offer the flexibility needed for companies to distribute their application programs to servers across the Internet according to demand in an efficient manner. The companies would benefit by having fast user response times and low set up and maintenance costs.