Some News about the recent downtime

As you know, the site went down for an hour on the 7th of December, but this wasn’t for maintenance or for spring cleaning, This was in fact something far bigger.

Previously the server that was hosing thelongmile.net was hosted in the United States. In Newark, New Jersey on server newark149 if your interested of course.

Now this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, we had response times less than 100 milliseconds from the UK, it was in essence a very fast connection from the UK to the US, however, since the majority of my hits come from the UK, it would always be faster to have the server in the UK rather than the US.

Now thanks to Linode opening a data centre in the UK, (here if your interested)  http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/26/video-tour-telecity-powergate-data-center/ we were given the opportunity to move our server to London3 which of course has access to the London LINX exchange.

So, what does this mean for you to visitors? Essentially nothing, if anything the website will be ever so slightly faster but by an amount so small you might not notice it. However it does mean that we will also benefit from future upgrades to the UK london exchange and network speed.

So why am I telling you? I thought you’d like to know that I’m doing things, and of course I am doing them in your interests.

Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks to our new location in the UK, we now have ping times averaging 42ms! We previously had an average of just over 100ms! The site is now twice as fast to respond thanks to being in the UK as displayed by the screenshot below.