April 28th, 2010
posted by Alex Vayl
As I’ve been working out of our Singapore offices for the past 3 months, one of the most common questions I’ve received from local businesses is how cloud servers are different from shared hosting and VPS offerings.
While it’s true that cloud-based hosting is gaining significant ground in the U.S., adoption is relatively slow in most of Asia. According to William Fellows, from The 451 Group, 93% of spending on infrastructure as a service is done by the U.S., 6% by Europe and just 1% by Asia.
As such, we’ve decided to organize #cloudchat, an event at Hackerspace, to shed some light on the subject. Our VP of development, Michael Venzke, will be discussing basic cloud fundamentals and benefits over VPS; then delving deeper into more technical discussion points, such as cloud interoperability and automatic development/QA environments.
To complement, Dr. Kris Beevers, Voxel’s Principle Software Architect, will be discussing proper CDN implementation and performance optimization in cloud deployments.
If you happen to be in Singapore, please drop by. Our experts will be taking your questions. Students, entrepreneurs, local business, developers and start-ups are all welcome. Of course, food and drinks are on us!
Event Details:
Thursday, May 6th, 2010 @ 7:30pm
Hackerspace - 70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483
RSVP: twtvite.com/voxel-cloudchat
Follow us @voxeldotnet
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March 11th, 2010
posted by Zachary Smith
With Asian web users representing an even larger portion of today’s Internet, Voxel is seeing more of its customers target the Asian market and require Asian web hosting for their applications, social networking tools, ad delivery solutions or media content. Users are demanding top performance and service providers and startups need to deliver that in a cost-effective manner. So how does Voxel address the vast market challenges and differences of Asian hosting? The answer is simpler than one might think.
When we decided to tackle this problem, Voxel first took a look at the differences in hosting between more mature markets (US/Europe) and the Asian web hosting market. We found that:
- Network quality varied dramatically from country-to-country or within certain regions, often making a SaaS application hosted in Hong Kong unusable to business customers in Singapore.
- Pricing was hidden behind walled gardens of custom quote forms or long term commitments. This was in contrast to the wide array of transparent pricing options available in the US and Europe.
- Asian cloud computing offerings were limited and no major public cloud vendors were offering solutions in Asia.
- Bandwidth pricing and server bandwidth was much more expensive for end users, or was limited in small quantities like 1Mbps “capped” services.
Voxel recognized that startups in Asia, as well as US and European Internet companies moving into the Asian market, needed these issues addressed in order to fully capitalize on the opportunities in this emerging Internet market. To that end, Voxel decided to open an Asian datacenter and hosting location and extend the Voxel IP network to Singapore and Hong Kong.
We opened our first datacenter presence in Singapore in 2009, enabling our clients to quickly deliver media files, HTTP assets and videos via our Asian CDN nodes. We then worked to build out our network, establish peering relationship and expand regional interconnection options so that we could lower the price of bandwidth for Asian customers and increase the quality and control of the delivery. Finally, late last year, Voxel started offering our popular hosting services in Singapore, including dedicated servers and our cutting-edge VoxCLOUD cloud computing and cloud server product.
Customers can now take advantage of:
- Transparent and cost competitive bandwidth pricing with fully burstable, 2 x 1Gbps per server network ports.
- Global CDN delivery via VoxCAST with each and every account.
- Local cloud servers and dedicated servers, available through our online control panel, desktop Adobe AIR application or REST-based hosting API.
- BaseManaged raw infrastructure or fully ProManaged services, including custom load-balanced clusters, multi-site hosting options and high-scalability deployments.
- Global hosting options via one invoice: the U.S. from our New York hosting facility, Europe from our Amsterdam hosting facility and Asia from our Singapore hosting facility.
- 24 x 7 x 365 export support on the entire infrastructure stack (hardware, Linux OS, CDN delivery, and application services support).
- Local sales offices in both New York and Singapore
We encourage customers who need to target the Asian Internet market to contact us. We have sales engineers available 24 hours per day out of both our New York and Singapore offices and we’d love to help you reach your Asian customer base.
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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.
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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.
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February 8th, 2009
posted by Zachary Smith
Voxel client dailykos.com was recently featured in an article at techworld.com.au highlighting how they have grown their infrastructure in line with the site’s rise in popularity and page views. Read the full article here.
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January 14th, 2009
posted by Zachary Smith
TheWhir.com, the leading industry source for web hosting news, has published a story covering Voxel’s growth and customer wins during 2008.
“(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting and content delivery network provider Voxel Dot Net (www.voxel.net) announced on Wednesday it saw a 72 percent increase in net income and a 63 percent increase in total revenue in 2008.
Founded in 1999, Voxel says it is the “only service provider to offer both hosting bandwidth and CDN service over its own backbone.” The company provides a range of services, including international CDN, data storage, IP circuits, managed hosting and infrastructure services.
The company had several customer wins in 2008, growing its customer base by 32 percent. Voxel expanded business with Perez Hilton and DailyKos, as well as signed new deals with New York Observer, Politicker.com, CBS’s “Rachel Ray Show”, Mochila, SourceForge.net, AmieStreet.com and AccuRadio.com.”
Read the full story here.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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October 28th, 2008
posted by Dr. Kris Beevers
Voxel has a lot of customers who really know what they’re doing. Many of them are in the business of writing code, and pointing and clicking and typing — manual stuff — is the kind of thing these customers tend to like to avoid. Be it purging content from VoxCAST, provisioning a new VPS or dedicated server, rebooting a machine, fetching performance data — whatever — there’s a case for letting our customers do it in code.
Voxel Labs to the rescue once again — this time with hAPI, Voxel’s new Hosting API. hAPI turns much of Voxel’s infrastructure inside-out and makes it programmatically accessible to our customers. hAPI is a REST API based on HTTP requests and XML or JSON responses, a lot like other popular web services APIs. To read more about the hAPI interface and get started, check out the hAPI documentation.
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