Posts tagged ‘network’

Planned Network Maintenance - 22nd and 29th Feb (between 4 - 7am) 20 Feb 08

We’ve received notification from the data-centre that during the above period they will be performing maintenance on the core network. This is to install firmware upgrades to distribution switches and to perform cabling maintenance, which will fix a variety of minor issues, and will help ensure future network stability.

During the maintenance period you will possibly see a number of brief outages to servers (less than 2 minutes). If you experience any issues after the maintenance period, please submit a support ticket and we’ll deal with it straight away.

Posted 20 February 2008 by John Leach ::: add comment

Planned Network Maintenance - 18 Dec (between 4 - 7am) 12 Dec 07

** UPDATE: We’ve heard from the datacentre that this maintenance has been postponed until the new year. **

We’ve received notification from the datacentre that during the above period they will be performing maintenance on the core network, involving firmware/software upgrades to core switches and routers to fix several minor issues and further ensure future network stability.

During the window you may see a number of brief outages (less than 2 minutes). If you experience any issues after the maintenance window has closed, please submit a support ticket and we’ll deal with it straight away.

Posted 12 December 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: Comments closed

IP addresses and Google UK 24 Aug 07

Following on from John’s post earlier this week about the low latency benefit of our UK based servers (over US based competitors) for customers/websites with a European audience, there is another factor to consider. Google.

Google UK

As Google’s Webmaster Help Centre explains:

While all sites in our index return for searches restricted to “the web,” we draw on a relevant subset of sites for each country restrict. Our crawlers identify the country that corresponds to a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site’s IP address, and its domain restrict.

That said, your site’s domain doesn’t need to match the country domain for which you’d like it to return…

Now, I can’t really see how Big G can work out the first “factor” (physical location) without the second (IP address), using some sort of IP geolocation data. So as far as I can see, if you want to appear in the “pages from the UK” set of results in Google UK, having a UK IP address is an important factor.

Posted 24 August 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: 2 comments

It’s the latency, you see 20 Aug 07

I saw this question about Brightbox on a forum today:

what would be the advantages of hosting with a UK company over a US based company

One simple repercussion of hosting a site for a European audience on an ISP in the USA concerns the Atlantic ocean, which happens to be quite big and that means packets take a long time to traverse it. This results in higher latency. If your ISP is on the West Coast it’s even further away.

Some casual ping testing from a machine in the UK to a number of Rails hosts in the US showed between 95 and 161 millisecond round trip times. With HTTP ping testing I was seeing up to 327ms, which is likely due to the TCP handshake consisting of at least 2 packets before the request is even issued. From the same machine to a Brightbox (different ISPs of course) I saw around 15 milisecond ping RTT and 33 millisecond HTTP.

Average Ping RTT graph (smaller is better)

Ping test

Average HTTP RTT graph (smaller is better)

HTTP ping graph

With HTTP features such as persistent connections you can reduce the impact of the TCP handshake, but with these hosts your European visitors will still see up to 161ms delay before your Rails application even starts processing the request. Fragment caching won’t help you much there. With the new breed of AJAX web applications this is a huge impact on how responsive things will feel to your visitors.

This wasn’t a scientific test with double blind trials, lab coats and conical flasks but it gives you an idea of what a difference 5,500 kilometers makes.

Posted 20 August 2007 by John Leach ::: 1 comment