Hello People,

We have had an enormous response to our services ever since we have launched them commercially. We appreciate all your queries and we will always try our level best to satisfy them all. We have noticed a common trend with most of the clients from whom we received information or quote requests. They asked us for example sites where in the round robin DNS has been implemented for them to review the speed, functionality and benefits of these services. We have now setup a demo site ourselves which shows the entire range of features we can offer with this service. The demo site’s URL is http://www.downlods.info and we will be explain more about the unique setup step by step below:

1. The domain hosts a wordpress site which has almost 1700+ random articles from different RSS feeds found on the web. We are still populating the site with more and more content and we intend to put in a few thousand pages/posts on it so that we can show how a resource intensive can work on the clusters. The first thing you should notice is that the site uses round robin DNS and so it has two A records.

[root@server ~]# host downlods.info
downlods.info has address 69.10.60.149
downlods.info has address 69.10.48.100

Thus the domain runs from two different IPs to balance out the traffic on the domain using round robin DNS configuration.

2. These two IPs run lighttpd installations with PHP configured on FastCGI mode. This can be seen as below:

[root@server ~]# HEAD 69.10.60.149
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:29:42 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.23
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:27:25 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.60.149:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
 
[root@server ~]# HEAD 69.10.48.100
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:29:46 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.23
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:27:29 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.48.100:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10

Lighttpd has been custom tweaked on these servers to handle scripts like wordpress and acts as a proxy to pass http requests to much lighter Nginx instances. You can notice the actual site is served from Nginx as below :

[root@server ~]# HEAD http://www.downlods.info
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:28:25 GMT
Server: nginx/0.8.7
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:26:09 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.48.100:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: wassup=MDE5Y2Y5N2QzYjNkMjRiNWZlYTM1NDg5ZDVmNDBlMzQ6OjEyNjE2NDk2MDU6Ojo6NjguMTY4LjIwOC4xMDo6c2VydmVyLmRvd25sb2RzLmluZm8%253D; expires=Thu, 24-Dec-2009 10:18:25 GMT; path=/
Set-Cookie: wpgb_visit_last_php-default=1261646905; expires=Fri, 24-Dec-2010 09:28:25 GMT; path=/
X-Pingback: http://www.downlods.info/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10

Traffic is distributed using round robin balancing which can be seen as per the logs below:

2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1105) proxy - start
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1143) proxy - ext found
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1214) proxy - used round-robin balancing
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1277) proxy - found a host 66.45.229.83 80
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.392) connect delayed: 15
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1017) proxy: fdevent-out 1
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.828) proxy - connect - delayed success
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1105) proxy - start
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1143) proxy - ext found
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1214) proxy - used round-robin balancing
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1277) proxy - found a host 69.10.60.149 8080
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.392) connect delayed: 17
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1017) proxy: fdevent-out 1
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.828) proxy - connect - delayed success

PHP is configured to run in FastCGI mode across the clustered setup and thus gives amazing speed to the blog site. You can use various third party tools to confirm the site speed even when the blog has more than 1700 posts and runs numerous ads as well. Here are some of the readily available tests we have already done.

The various results can be found at the links below:

Pingdom Results :

HyperSpin Results:

Location	Status	Time	Traceroute
	1. Seattle, Washington, USA (WA)	OK	2346ms	do traceroute
	2. San Jose, California, USA (CA)	OK	1274ms	do traceroute
	3. Dallas, Texas, USA (TX)	OK	834ms	do traceroute
	4. Ashburn, Virginia, USA (VA)	Test temporarily unvailable
	5. Chicago, Illinois, USA (IL)	Test temporarily unvailable
	6. Montreal, Quebec, Canada (QC)	OK	1680ms	do traceroute
	7. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK (UK)	OK	3160ms	do traceroute
	8. Amsterdam, Netherlands (NL)	OK	2728ms	do traceroute
	9. Madrid, Spain (ES)	OK	3788ms	do traceroute
	10. Milan, Italy (IT)	OK	4692ms	do traceroute
	11. Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany (DE)	OK	4144ms	do traceroute
	12. Singapore (SG)	OK	4973ms	do traceroute
	13. Zhongzheng, Taipei, Taiwan (TP)	Test temporarily unvailable
	14. Neihu, Taipei, Taiwan (NH)	Test temporarily unvailable
	15. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia (AU)	OK	6406ms	do traceroute

The domains we host on our shared clustered servers as well as on our custom built dedicated clustered have similar configuration and speed like this test domain. They infact have higher performance as each cluster is deployed with tweaks needed from a pre-hosting professional analysis of the sites we do. If you have further questions with the site setups on clusters, please feel free to contact us for clarification.