Our Base Connectivity

We have acquired connection to tier-1 provider Level 3 over burstable dedicated 1 Gbps circuit (an equivalent of 1.5x OC-12 circuit). We have additional live online connections via BGP multipathing from two backup providers. First backup provider is XO with full dedicated 100Mbps connection and second backup provider is Cogent over 1 Gbps line (currently provisioned at 200 Mbps.) This provides us with an additional bandwidth equivalent of two T-3 Circuits from XO and 6 OC-3 circuits from Cogent (provisioned at 1.5x OC-3 level.)

Our Name Servers

We provide state of the art domain name services (DNS) to our customers via our geographically diverse network sprawling across North American continent with direct peering with majority of tier-1 providers including Time Warner, UUNet, Sprint, Qwest, Savvis, AT&T and many more tier-1 and tier-2 providers. Our nameservers are anycasted from many locations including major markets such as Virginia, Illinois, Texas, California and Washington as well as international markets including Canada, Netherlands and Japan.

What is the Backbone Coverage?

Backbone by definition connects all major markets with full redundancy. Minor market offshoots, such as last mile connectivity (ie your office's T1) may not be redundant and that depends on your ISP. To provide you with better understanding how well our systems are connected, we are providing network maps from our backbone providers. Please note that these may be out of date as providers constantly build up their capacity.

What is BGP Multipath?

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) defines how backbone providers route packets to destination. With BGP multipath the network is given multiple choice option and generally the network chooses the most optimal way of accessing the destination. You can think of it as commute to work except you are given choice of several highways you can take. Depending on where you live you will choose one over the rest because it is the best choice for you but your coworkers might choose different path. Our production servers are multipathed through several tier-1 and tier-2 providers for maximum speed in an environment where it is not feasible to clone production environment into remote mirrors.

What is BGP Anycast?

Anycast as defined in BGP is utilized by all top application server providers. BGP protocol allows for added redundancy by allowing multiple destinations for same IP address. When you try to resolve servers that we manage, your computer will travel one request upstream but several of our computers in different geographical locations will receive your packet. The fastest server will respond first and all other responses will be ignored by your computer as you are already supplied with the answer. With anycast we can ensure that you will receive speedy answer and if we must take some of our servers offline, you still will receive responses from backup locations.