Why should I deploy Squid?
Or.. "Why should I bother with web caching? Can't I just buy more bandwidth?") The developers of the HTTP protocol identified early on that there was going to be exponential growth in content and, concerned with distribution mechanisms, added powerful caching primitives. These primitives allow content developers and distributors to hint to servers and end-user applications how content should be validated, revalidated and cached. This had the effect of dramatically reducing the amount of bandwidth required to serve content and improved user response times. Squid is one of the projects which grew out of the initial content distribution and caching work in the mid-90s. It has grown to include extra features such as powerful access control, authorization, logging, content distribution/replication, traffic management and shaping and more. It has many, many work-arounds, new and old, to deal with incomplete and incorrect HTTP implementations. For ISPs: Save on bandwidth