I have not used Voxel yet, although you guys are on my list of providers to try out. I’ve heard good things. I will be contacting you this month. Does Voxel offer any sort of free trials for larger traffic sites?

Here is some information I found about the Amazon CDN after digging a bit. I found some of this stuff out by accident. I figured I would share.

I noticed some images being served from enstxzrnsprxt.6hops.net – when I do a traceroute I get:

6. ae-12-55.car2.Newark1.Level3.net
7. AMAZONCOM.car2.Newark1.Level3.net
8. 216-137-40-129.ewr2.cloudfront.net

Check out the hops there. It appears that Amazon is in Newark connected to Level3, and the domain cloudfront.net is interesting.

When I do a WHOIS lookup on cloudfront I get the same pseudo-anonymized registration information as 6hops.net. Interesting eh?

It gets more interesting. If I check the ASN for that IP I get:

[dbutler@zonker] ~> whois -a 16509

OrgName: Amazon.com, Inc.
OrgID: AMAZON-4
Address: 605 5th Ave S
City: SEATTLE
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98104
Country: US

Hmmmmmm, what is this mysterious cloudfront?

Trying 216.137.36.152…
Connected to 216.137.36.152.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET / HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Server: S3Cache
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:16:20 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1171
Expires: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:16:20 GMT
X-Cache: Miss from cf-pxy
Via: 1.0 fff0fbeaa9a952d8e03289463bc6f830.cloudfront.net:11180 (S3Cache)
Proxy-Connection: close

A-ha, note the references to ‘S3Cache’ Sounds like this could be their new CDN offering!

Further evidence in some DNS lookups from some of my servers hosted with various providers around the world:

enstxzrnsprxt.6hops.net is alias’d to enstxzrnsprxt.ewr2.6hops.net
enstxzrnsprxt.6hops.net is alias’d to enstxzrnsprxt.iad2.6hops.net
enstxzrnsprxt.6hops.net is alias’d to enstxzrnsprxt.sfo4.6hops.net

Those are the only alias’s I could find.

So, just an FYI seems Amazons service is called CLOUDFRONT or 6HOPS.

Assuming the codes for DNS correspond to airport codes, they have confirmed nodes in NEWARK, VIRGINIA, and SAN FRANSISCO.

The plot thickens!