[LINK] Any top-20 US site that has East and West-coast servers?

[Glen Turner]

On 22/05/12 00:08, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> I'm trying to measure the performance and availability of my internet
> connectivity to the US backbone.
> 
> So, what high-profile sites are hosted in the East coast and West Coast?.

The internet doesn't work quite like that.

1)
High profile sites will run or rent a content distribution network.
Answers from the US West Coast CDN server will hide the further-away US
East Coast CDN server from your view. For larger CDNs your traffic may
not even leave your Australian ISP.

If you take the trouble to understand how the CDN works then you may be
able to pull content directly from the further node rather than from the
closer one. But for some CDN designs this is only possible with inside
knowledge.

2)
You assume there is a "US backbone". An Australian ISP will interconnect
with multiple US carriers (for redundancy). There's no point in an
Australian ISP building their own cross-US capacity to reach sites
located in the USA. Your traffic may well using differing US carriers
depending upon hour-to-hour load-sharing of the ISP's expensive Au-US
undersea capacity.

> I know about Mae-East and Mae-West but AFAIK those do not run web servers I
> can check with http...

Like a lot of internet exchanges they are distributed across hundred of
kilometers, so performance to a web server in some part of the IX is
very complex -- determining host versus position versus network
contributions to performance is complex and can well take intense
discussion with staff at multiple organisations and several weeks.


Characterising a network path is such a difficult problem that
research-supporting networks deploy the PerfSonar system so that
research network users can find the path characteristics they need for
their planning.  Commercial networks obviously don't have the same
motivation (no single user is going to show up wanting to transfer a
petabyte) and are necessarily more concerned about the PR consequences
(even if your network is perfect, someone will misread the graph, so
it's all PR downside).

Basically if you want to know if your ISP performs well then check the
sites you use, and give them a tick or a cross.  If the ISP is pulling
the data from a CDN server in their computer room, well that's a bigger
win than even a 100Gbps pipe across the USA.

-glen