Anycast Hosting?

tester4

I was wondering if anyone knows of a company that offers Anycast hosting, in terms of it's no single hosting server and in each persons country depending on what is closer - they actually visit a server that is hosted in the country closest and the storage is geo-replicated between all.

I've been googling but haven't found much.

sanvit

Depends.
BuyVM provides anycast IP if you have VMs on all 3 of their locations.
There are also anycast-as-a-service like X4B (kinda) or Rage4.
For static websites, I'd rather recommend using a CDN instead.
If you're talking about web hosting, there's none IMO, as it would be a PITA to manage DB replication, session, etc. (Not quite sure on this tho)

tester4

@sanvit said:
Depends.
BuyVM provides anycast IP if you have VMs on all 3 of their locations.
There are also anycast-as-a-service like X4B (kinda) or Rage4.
For static websites, I'd rather recommend using a CDN instead.
If you're talking about web hosting, there's none IMO, as it would be a PITA to manage DB replication, session, etc. (Not quite sure on this tho)

Yeah, I'm of the same opinion but thought I'd ask anyways. Currently using Route53 but noticed they don't have East EU or Central US regions but have just now discovered Azure at least has Central US so probably going to move over to that.

RickBakkr

Rent a /24 IPv4 and a /48 IPv6, ask for an ASN (at me - shameless self promotion ), a bunch of Vultr boxes worldwide and DIY it together like Samir: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/samir_jafferali/build-your-own-anycast-network-in-nine-steps

sanvit

@tester4 said:

@sanvit said:
Depends.
BuyVM provides anycast IP if you have VMs on all 3 of their locations.
There are also anycast-as-a-service like X4B (kinda) or Rage4.
For static websites, I'd rather recommend using a CDN instead.
If you're talking about web hosting, there's none IMO, as it would be a PITA to manage DB replication, session, etc. (Not quite sure on this tho)

Yeah, I'm of the same opinion but thought I'd ask anyways. Currently using Route53 but noticed they don't have East EU or Central US regions but have just now discovered Azure at least has Central US so probably going to move over to that.

If GeoDNS works for you, that will also be fine
Do note that not having a DNS PoP (Route 53), doesn't mean that the DNS server cannot route you to Centeral US or East Europe

tester4

@sanvit said:

@tester4 said:

@sanvit said:
Depends.
BuyVM provides anycast IP if you have VMs on all 3 of their locations.
There are also anycast-as-a-service like X4B (kinda) or Rage4.
For static websites, I'd rather recommend using a CDN instead.
If you're talking about web hosting, there's none IMO, as it would be a PITA to manage DB replication, session, etc. (Not quite sure on this tho)

Yeah, I'm of the same opinion but thought I'd ask anyways. Currently using Route53 but noticed they don't have East EU or Central US regions but have just now discovered Azure at least has Central US so probably going to move over to that.

If GeoDNS works for you, that will also be fine
Do note that not having a DNS PoP (Route 53), doesn't mean that the DNS server cannot route you to Centeral US or East Europe

Issue is I'm using latency based routing so without a central location I can't get any people to the central server as East/West are being used or East/West nodes.

SplitIce

For the actual hosting side of things if you have a decent budget I would actually recommend S3 or something similar. Something you can push static content to and then serve from your Anycast service of choice (i.e X4B - self promotion).

I've found this to work very well in the past. Saves all the complexity of database replication.

Of course Amazon isnt cheap, although that said for low traffic with the majority of your pages served by your Anycast cache (site dependant) it can be quite attractive. I've got a site pre-production currently setup and under load testing. 1k hits/day and only a few dollars per month on the S3 side.

ViridWeb

I think BuyVM offers anycast.. contact @Francisco for confirmation..

tester4

@SplitIce said:
For the actual hosting side of things if you have a decent budget I would actually recommend S3 or something similar. Something you can push static content to and then serve from your Anycast service of choice (i.e X4B - self promotion).

I've found this to work very well in the past. Saves all the complexity of database replication.

Of course Amazon isnt cheap, although that said for low traffic with the majority of your pages served by your Anycast cache (site dependant) it can be quite attractive. I've got a site pre-production currently setup and under load testing. 1k hits/day and only a few dollars per month on the S3 side.

Do you offer geolocation/latency based DNS routing or just normal anycast DNS?

SplitIce

@tester4 Neither Anycast Hosting, not Anycast DNS.

tetech

Out of interest, what type of budget do you have and what type of traffic (GB/month)? Anycast does not come cheap.