December 12, 2006 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 11:18 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (2)

"Stop Hosting, Start Delivering"

After reading this VentureBeat post about BitGravity, a new CDN, I was curious to find out more about the company. CEO Perry Wu promises "no latency" in online video delivery; Revision3 (a "TV network for the web" launched by the founders of Digg) and TomGreen.com are customers, along with some "bigger names in publishing".

I wasn't able to find much additional information. BitGravity's website is vague about its technology infrastructure ("innovative routing, hardware , and file system"; "centralized architecture, constellation system, multiple bandwidth providers") and pricing ("no armies of network people, many standard features that others charge you extra for"). Media coverage is limited to this CNET article, which says the company is already profitable.

On the other hand, I did learn something about CacheFly through MochiMedia co-founder Bob Ippolito's blog. (Bob already considers BitGravity a "tier 1" CDN, BTW.) MochiMedia needed to serve large amounts of small content objects to a global audience. First Bob tried Amazon's S3, but he discovered during a trip to Taipei that its performance was "horrifying" (HTTP request for 20KB file took 1.6 seconds)(download times from Taipei tend to be awful for content hosted at most North American data centers). CacheFly was 3x faster, and Bob was pleased with the company's transparent and affordable pricing.

By the way, during the CDN panel at the Tier 1 hosting summit back in September, execs from Akamai, Limelight, SolidState and Netli affirmed that they see hosting providers as valued partners. Cachefly has a different take. Its demo urges viewers to "Stop Hosting... Start Delivering". BitGravity, too, argues that CDNs help customers save money through "better purchasing power and higher utilization" of their network and the equipment. CNet says these two start-ups are challenging Akamai, but it sounds like they've got much more in mind.

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You do realize that it takes like 3 seconds for an electronic signal to travel around the world. I'll bet good money that Amazon's s3 performance was actually quite good and that the majority of those 1.6 seconds from Taipei were spent waiting for the request to travel that far and the first bits of data to make the return trip. To say that Amazon's s3 performance was "horrifying" is to make an assumption based on ignorance of how things work. A more accurate statement would be that connection speeds to any North American servers are "horrifying" and that Bob mistakenly assumed that having a service hosted by a well known and reliable company would somehow enable it to break the laws of physics.

# Posted By masukomi | 12/13/06 10:37 AM

Hi Masukomi,

Here's what Bob posted on his blog:

"Our server (in San Francisco) - 0.803384 seconds
S3 (seems to be in Seattle) - 1.652920 seconds
CacheFly (maybe from the Tokyo POP) - 0.526801 seconds"

I don't think he's looking to break the laws of physics. He just came to the conclusion that North American servers might not be best for downloading stuff from in Asia. And I agree with you that S3's infrastructure is most likely excellent, it just might not be optimized (yet) for a worldwide audience.

# Posted By Isabel Wang | 12/13/06 11:21 AM

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