Seems I’m not alone in being annoyed by Limelight Networks LLC. Seems both Akamai and MIT sued them, and so did Level 3, the largest Tier-1 network provider underlying so many major ISP’s. LLNW on the other hand are a big media content service provider with their own dedicated networks, but only a very small 1% or 2% of their delivery involves the any-to-any long tail (a million audiences of one) of the internet cloud.
I have no idea how their business model involves constantly hitting my site, I had guessed (wrongly – post note – correctly in fact) they were some web-crawler gathering links (associated maybe with the Uni of Ariz at Tempe) but I could never see any pattern in their hits or any resulting consequences, beyond the hits themselves. Had a big surge in their hits in the last few days, beyond almost random single post / zero dwell time hits, the hits now involve many multiple post / page hits with total dwell times of many minutes (up to 40mins). I would say for any periods I have monitored, there have been ten times as many LLNW hits as any other (even Google users).
What is going on Limelight ? You are skewing my hit stats beyond anything useful, unless I know how to account for yours. My content is miniscule beer compared to yours.
[Post Note – This has been the subject of much blog correspondence.
http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/bad-bot-savvis-communications-cary-nc/#comment-2801 and
http://www.google.com/search?hl=no&q=limelight+kavam+savvis+blog+hits
And here is the explanation http://www.searchme.com/support/pages/spider.php
So it is a crawler (a spider called Charlotte) which uses LLNW in Tempe, AZ, from a Mountain View, CA address of www.SearchMe.com , which explains another rash of hits.]