NEW YORK, September 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- Panther Origin Shielding Service Helps studiVZ Connect Many Millions of University and Public School Students and Graduates

Panther Express (http://www.pantherexpress.net), a leading global provider of high-performance/high-value content delivery services, today announced they have been selected to provide content delivery services for studiVZ (http://www.studivz.net), the largest social networking site in Europe with over 5 million members. studiVZ provides three social networking services: schulerVZ (www.schulerVZ.net) targeted to elementary and secondary school student; studiVZ (www.studiVZ.net) targeted to university students; and meinVZ (www.meinVZ.net) targeted to graduates and everyone else not in school or at university.

Launched less than two years ago, the schulerVZ and studiVZ sites currently generate over 12 billion page views a month and over 55,000 requests a second. In February of 2008, studiVZ decided to migrate away from their original content delivery network. After comparing performance and business offers from the world's leading CDN companies, they choose to utilize Panther Express's content delivery network for all three of their platforms.

"We met with most of the top content delivery networks to see what they could provide," said Marcus Riecke, CEO of studiVZ. "In addition to Panther Express's outstanding performance and ability to scale to meet our rapidly growing member base, we were very impressed with Panther's amazing customer support and helpful business attitude. They were knowledgeable, responsive, and cared about our business. When we had questions, Panther's Europe based team was able to get us answers within hours, rather than days or weeks. We trust Panther Express to deliver."

Panther CDN's Shielding (http://pantherexpress.net/technology/shielding), Origin Protection and Cache Hit Ratio features are very important to studiVZ. When users make a request to a cache that does not have the object, the cache makes an HTTP request back to the origin web server. By using the Panther CDN Shielding Service, this request is directed to the Shield POP first, rather than going directly to the origin web server. This greatly reduces the load on the origin server and helps eliminate the need for capital investment in larger origin servers as well as providing a better and more responsive end user experience.

"The migration from studiVZ's previous CDN to Panther Express went very smoothly and without any problems," said Gad Stanislas, Vice President International for Panther Express. "Panther CDN now successfully serves 100 per cent of studiVZ's static content -- and we are positioned to scale up as studiVZ grows in popularity. Unlike many other CDNs, the Panther CDN architecture can cost-effectively handle large amounts of ongoing traffic as well as unexpected spikes."

About studiVZ

studiVZ Ltd. was created in October 2005. Since January 2007 studiVZ Ltd. has been part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Through the platforms studiVZ (studiVZ.net), schulerVZ (schuelerVZ.net), and meinVZ (meinVZ.net), studiVZ Ltd. is the most successful and established online social network in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The platforms have a combined membership of 10 million registered users; a number that continues to grow rapidly. Our goal is to make the company the most established and successful online network in Europe.

The management team of studiVZ Ltd. consists of Marcus Riecke (CEO), Michael Brehm (COO) and Dennis Bemmann (founder & CTO). The company's headquarters are in Berlin, and it currently has almost 200 employees.

About Panther Express

Panther Express Corp. is the industry's best-value content delivery network; a high-performance global CDN with an innovative infrastructure. The Panther system was designed from scratch to leverage today's Internet, providing fast performance and reliability using our highly optimized architecture. Over 350 media, entertainment, technology, news and Web 2.0 companies rely on our cost-efficient system to deliver their valuable content. Panther combines rapid provisioning, outstanding support, reliability and scalability with attractive terms and competitive pricing. The company recently secured a world class management team led by Steve Liddell (CEO), Dennis Morgan (CFO) and Mark King (VP Sales and Marketing). It was founded in 2005 by former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and DoubleClick Co-founder and former CTO Dwight Merriman. Panther CDN is privately held and backed by Index Ventures and Greylock Partners. For more information: www.pantherexpress.net

Contact: Judy Baliman, Panther Express jbaliman@pantherexpress.net +1-646-747-0941 Web site: http://www.pantherexpress.net http://www.studivz.net http://www.schulerVZ.net

Judy Baliman, Panther Express, +1-646-747-0941, jbaliman@pantherexpress.net