CloudClimate.com Blog
March, 17th 2010
How Fast Can CDNs and Cloud-Hosted Servers Deliver Website Assets to Real Surfers?
10 days ago I have announced our globally distributed CDN speed test on this blog. For CloudClimate.com we have developed a CDN Performance Test suite that Internet users can run over your their personal Internet connection. The test performs ten downloads of a 64 Kbyte image from 12 selected CDN hosting companies plus 12 cloud servers running in public clouds around the globe.
Thanks to all users who have visited the webpage in the mean time. We now have logged the results from 66.000 test requests in our database and I can go ahead and publish our first results:
Feb., 22nd 2010
Run the CloudClimate CDN Performance Test to Find Out Which CDN Provider or Cloud Provider Serves You Fastest
State of the art websites use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) nowadays to deliver static websites assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files. In order to deliver these assets as fast as possible to the website visitor the CDN providers run a network of so called “edge servers” in multiple locations. As soon as your browser requests a website asset its connection is directed to the “closest” server (in a network topological view) which finally delivers the data.
This sounds great in theory, but in real life it can be a complex task. One aspect is running an edge server network around the world (largest provider Akamai reports more than 40.000 servers around the globe). And there is “the last mile” issue: Website visitors are usually not sitting in data centers with fiber optic connections. They use cable, DSL, T1, etc.
We wanted to find out:
Feb., 18th 2010
Cloudharmony.com shares insights into Cloud Hosting and CDN speeds
Website cloudharmony.com has posted a detailed report about cloud speeds on their website with a list of top clouds and top CDNs.
Nov., 10th 2009
How fast is your cloud? Depends on where you’re standing
Today Paessler CEO Dirk Paessler had a telefon interview about CloudClimate.com with techtarget.com. They posted an interesting article about cloudclimate on their website.
Oct., 2nd 2009
Amazon may run 40.000 servers for EC2
The cloudscaling.com Blog writes: How Big is Amazon’s EC2? Big. 40,000 servers.
Aug., 25th 2009
Added Server Monitoring for Flexiscale and SoftLayer
Over the last days we have added two more probes to the CloudClimate network: Flexiscale and SoftLayer. We are also now publishing results for the CloudLayer CDN from SoftLayer.
Aug., 12th 2009
Making Our Website Faster: A Comparison of Cloud Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) with Cloud Storage, Cloud Hosting and Old-Fashioned Hosting
We are currently preparing a new setup for the hosting of www.paessler.com. Because visitors to our website are coming from all over the world we decided to host CSS, images and media files on a global content delivery network in order to provide a swift website experience for all visitors.
The advantage of using a CDN (Content Delivery Network, see wikipedia) is that website visitors will be served media files from the closest “edge-server” of the CDN and not from our own servers in the Rackspace data center in Dallas TX (the dynamic HTML would still be served from Dallas, though).
Aug., 4th 2009
Top Cloud Hosting Hosters Are Amazon and Rackspace
An analysis of the top 500,000 websites conducted by a startup called InfiBase found that 1550 websites were hosted on EC2 followed by 1373 sites hosted by Rackspace. Other hosters covered by the analysis were Joyent (205 sites), Google App Engine (78 sites), and GoGrid (42 sites).
July, 29th 2009
How Amazon's CPU hardware influences your EC2 instance performance
Infinibase has published some interesting benchmark stats on their blog. They explain how much the actual CPU type that you will be assigned for your EC2 instance will impact the performance of your instance.
July, 17th 2009
eWeek: CloudClimate Web Site Monitors Cloud Service Performance
On the eWeek.com website today the short article "CloudClimate Web Site Monitors Cloud Service Performance" about www.cloudclimate.com was posted. It was created by eWeek editor Jeffrey Burt after an interview with Paessler CEO Dirk Paessler.
July, 8th 2009
Mosso Becomes The Rackspace Cloud
Rackspace is dropping the Mosso name for their cloud offering in favor of the new name "The Rackspace Cloud".
May, 26th 2009
Amazon EC2 Small Instance Only Marginally Faster Than an EEE PC?
Blogger Björn Buckwalter has published his own performance comparison of EC2 instances, a DELL server blade, a Powerbook G4 and and EEE PC. His results match results we have seen in our own comparison tests (see the Paessler.com website).
May, 20th 2009
Monitoring the Birth of a Search Engine - Wolfram|Alpha Goes Online
Over the last weekend the engineers of Wolfram Research gradually launched their new search engine Wolfram|Alpha (or should I better say "knowledge engine"). We monitored their website during this launch with the CloudClimate servers.
May, 13th 2009
Rackspace Reports Numbers on its Mosso Cloud
Rackspace yesterday published a few interesting numbers about its Mosso cloud:
- 43,030 customers are using Mosso services, giving Rackspace revenue of $11 million in Q1 ($252 per customer)
- They still get 12 times more revenue from their "old-school" hosting services which are used by almost 20,000 customers ($134 mio, or $7,045 per customer)
Source: Data Center Knowledge website.
May, 8th 2009
Enabling and Analyzing Amazon CloudFront Request Logfiles
Users of the Amazon Cloudfront CDN (Content Delivery Network) can now enable request logging for their distributions. The logs are stored in S3. The user can then download the logs and analyze them using a standard logfile analyzer (e.g. urchin).
May, 6th 2009
Welcome to CloudClimate.com
Today www.cloudclimate.com officially leaves the "stealth mode". For the last weeks we have been preparing this new website that displays the live performance data of selected cloud hosting providers.
April, 14th 2009
Comparing Amazon EC2 performance with other cloud/VPS hosting options… and real hardware
We wanted to roughly rate performance of a virtual server hosted by Amazon EC2 compared to other hosting offerings. So last week we ran several performance tests on Amazon EC2 instances as well as other cloud and vps hosting platforms plus some servers in our own labs.
April, 6th 2009
CPU, Disk, Memory Speed Comparison of Amazon EC2 Instance Types
Last Friday I have posted our first results from recent monitoring experiments on Amazon EC2 instance types were we published a comparison of average performance of the Amazon EC2 instance types. Now, three days later, I can amend our observations on how the CPU, disk and memory performance of our EC2 instances behave if you monitor them for a couple of days (in our case between April 1st and April 5th).