Google Page Speed Service: Boosting Your Web Site Performance?

If you’re a cloud ISV, speed kills. That is to say: A page that’s slow to load is almost as bad as one that doesn’t load at all. Enter Google Page Speed Service, which can boost web performance by 25 percent to 60 percent, the search giant claims.

Page Speed Service’s design is simple: Point your site’s DNS entry at Google Page Speed Service, and Google automatically fetches the content and applies best optimization practices to it before delivering it to your customers. For users, it’s completely transparent — except for the fact that the site loads a lot faster, according to the Google blog entry. It’s Google’s entry into content delivery market, traditionally the domain of vendors like Akamai.

“Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices,” Google says.

If you’re interested, Google’s accepting signups for the Page Service beta, which is being offered free of charge while it gets tweaked and ready for a grand debut. When it launches for real, Google promises the pricing will be “competitive,” and in the meanwhile Page Service comes with a free tool to help determine how much it’d help your own pages.