July 1st, 2009
posted by mvenzke
We’re a big fan of open source here at Voxel, and have recently been expanding our support by donating hosting through our global VoxCAST CDN. For over a year now we’ve been mirroring Sourceforge on VoxCAST, hitting near-daily peaks of 300Mb/s.
Lately we’ve been working with Reed Loden @ Mozilla to set up a Mozilla mirror with VoxCAST, and it was up and running just in time for the Firefox 3.5 release.
Over the past 24 hours, we’ve served about 7+ TB out of our mirror, handling 7+ million requests.
I’m not exactly sure how they chose to send traffic our way, but we served nearly as much out of Europe as we did in the US, and a nice chunk out of Asia. For those interested, here’s a breakdown of the day by consolidated network locations we served Mozilla data out of:
- New York - 970k requests, 1TB
- Chicago - 400k requests, 500GB
- DC - 1M requests, 1TB
- San Jose - 1M requests, 1.1TB
- Amsterdam - 3M requests, 3TB
- Singapore - 800k requests, 500GB
Just before 5pm EDT, our mirror peaked around 4.5 Gb/s. The aggregated graph below is a good example of what can happen to a popular website with sudden traffic spikes:
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment »
June 26th, 2009
posted by asr
It’s been a while since my last post, and I’d like to take a few moments to bring everybody up to speed on some significant developments on the Voxel network.
First, I’m pleased to announce the expansion of the Voxel network to Seattle, WA. We are peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange (colloquially, the “SIX”), a not-for-profit organization committed to interconnecting organizations which run the gamut from small research networks and access providers to popular content providers and telecommunications giants. This is an important gain for us; it provides us strong reachability to viewer “eyeballs” in the northeast region and western Canada, long neglected by larger providers as a point of interconnection.
Not to overshadow this announcement, Voxel has also gone live with its Singapore (SIN1) facility, our first deployment in Asia. We are providing our full suite of services, including virtualized and dedicated server hosting and content delivery, out of this location.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2009
posted by Zachary Smith
Several Voxel-lites have ventured down to Florida to present at Gartner’s 2009 IT Infrastructure Summit. The event is pretty intense, filled with seminars and speaking events by Gartner’s top ranked analysts in cloud computing, content delivery and outsourced IT management. As a Gartner 2009 “Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing”, Voxel is super excited to be in attendance. If you happen to be at the event, come by and see our booth. We’re giving out free footballs (see gratuitous camera phone shot attached!).
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | No Comments »
June 15th, 2009
posted by Dr. Kris Beevers
A few weeks ago and after a lot of hard work by Voxel’s elite admins and network commandos, we finally brought VoxCAST’s Singapore POP online, nestled in the Equinix facility in Ayer Rajah a few minutes’ drive from our Singapore offices. With this, web browsers is AsiaPac will see significant improvements in load times for VoxCAST-hosted sites.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment »
May 29th, 2009
posted by Nathan Goulding
(Obligatory preface: For the better part of the last 4 years I’ve spent my days (and nights) installing, configuring, and tweaking servers that power one of the more trafficked political sites on the web. It all started with one Windows box and ended with eight LAMP servers, load balancing, firewalls, database replication, and enough Ethernet cables to circle the earth a few times over. The result: 150 page views per second and 300 Mbps, without breaking too much of a sweat.)
“Our website is getting hit with too much traffic. What do we do now?” CEOs, managers, and tech dudes have all asked this question a thousand times. Being in the business of server hosting, we’re asked this question every day. So, we thought it might be helpful to take you through the lifecycle of scaling a website – from shared hosting, to dedicated hosting, to managed hosting.
It’s easy to argue that shared hosting is the simplest way to get a website up and running. Pricing usually starts under $10, and the setup is fairly straightforward and automated. When a few weeks or months go by with no problems, you become confident that the masters of the Internet have finally made it so that website hosting “just works.” But then you publish a video of your pet poodle wearing tights and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and your website becomes an internet sensation. Then it crashes, and words like “DoS” and “hack” start getting thrown around. You break out into a cold sweat and find yourself running around like a squirrel in traffic.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | No Comments »
April 16th, 2009
posted by Zachary Smith
Not to toot our own horn, but we’re pretty happy that the research firm, Gartner, has recently named Voxel in its list of “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure, 2009.” This is all related to the hAPI-ness we’re creating with our infrastructure API’s and the recent announcement of the Silverlining Technology Preview.
If you’re a hosting customer of ours (or not!) we’d love to hear from you about how you’re mixing and matching traditional and cloud computing infrastructure in your deployments and what you’d love to have from a provider. We’re actively seeking feedback and word on successful implementations and if you’ve got a hAPI call you’d like to see in order to get programmatic access to your infrastructure, please let us know.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts, Press | No Comments »
January 13th, 2009
posted by asr
If you’ve been following recent press releases or trade rags with any regularity, chances are by now you’ve heard mention of “paid peering” as an up-and-coming commercial service offering. The most excellent Dan Rayburn made mention in his blog the other day:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/
A number of enterprising “eyeball providers” (a term we techies use referencing Internet Service Providers delivering connectivity primarily to end-users, or “eyeballs”, over DSL, cable, fiber, et cetera) have recently put out press releases announcing the availability of these services. We’ve been flooded with dozens of sales calls and e-mails promoting these services, from all the usual suspects, and then some!
With so much buzz in the air, what does this all mean, when stripped of the usual marketing fluff? To understand fully, one must take a step back and look at its origins: peering itself.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | 2 Comments »
December 4th, 2008
posted by Zachary Smith
TechTarget.com posted some thoughts on Moore’s Law and its correlation to commercial “cloud computing” offerings available today. Raj Dutt, Voxel’s CEO, was featured in the article, available here.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts, Press | No Comments »
December 3rd, 2008
posted by Zachary Smith
John Foley of InformationWeek, has published an article detailing Politicker.com’s move from EC2 to Voxel to scale for its heavy election season. Read the full article, titled Politicker.com Impeaches Amazon Web Services, online here.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts, Press | No Comments »
December 1st, 2008
posted by mvenzke
A month ago we announced hAPI, a HTTP REST API with XML or JSON responses, and the exposure of some VoxCAST CDN functionality through this programmable interface. Since then, VoxCAST customers have eagerly adopted it, requested more and more features, and submitted their own PHP, Perl, and Python client code as examples for everyone else.
We’ve been really excited about the response hAPI has received, and how it simplifies tasks not only for our customers, but even within our own systems at Voxel. As we mentioned last month, the CDN API calls were just the beginning.
Now we’re ready to announce some hosting API methods for the rest of our customers.
| Read the rest of this entry >>
Posted in General Posts | No Comments »
