Am I right in these assumptions?

Ok guys,

I think I understand better how this all works now; please correct me if
I'm wrong.

Squid is used to cache URL, gifs, etc from outside sites. It's purpose is
to make it so that *YOUR* customers/users, who may usually be connected
to your network, can have much faster access to pages "out there".

If I'm not really serving any customers directly dialed into my network,
it does me no good to run squid. I'll basically be caching and using up
all this memory and space for nothing.

I mostly host sites; I do have a very small number of dialed customers,
but my main business is hosting sites, virtual domains, etc. So from what
I can gather, squid will do nothing for me. Am I right?

Squid will do lots if you cache all these URLs on your server and tell
your customers to setup their browsers for proxy. Then if some outside
user accesses one of my sites, that site will be cached on their
provider's squid, and they'll be benefitting from that because THEIR
PROVIDER is "squidding" and NOT because I am "squidding".

Outside users (who don't point a proxy to my server) will experience NO
BENEFIT WHATSOEVER whether I do or don't run squid, right?

If my assumptions are right, then I have no reason to use squid. What I
SHOULD do is convince all the other providers out there to run squid for
THEIR users, so that when their users access my sites, they'll get it
much faster (because everything is cached) since they physically won't be
accessing my server...

If I'm wrong, please enlighten me! :)

Ricardo
Received on Fri Sep 06 1996 - 13:47:16 MDT