In a recent conversation with our data centre providers, they expressed a considerable amount of shock at how little bandwidth the Cleartrip site consumes despite our massive traffic volumes--our bandwidth consumption, according to them, was "just not possible."

At Cleartrip, we work extremely hard to ensure that our site is as fast as we can possibly make it. In the last few months we've made several changes to our systems to speed up the site even further. In another two days, we'll release one more upgrade to further reduce our bandwidth consumption, while delivering an even faster site to customers.

There are hundreds of different things that go into speedy performance at Cleartrip, but caching is a major component of our strategy and is implemented at various levels in our system architecture on the client and the server side.

Ryan Tomayko has a great write-up on Things Caches Do. The article focuses on a very specific type of caching, but if you're new to the subject, it's a good starting point for beginning to think about how caching should be a core component of your tech strategy.