Tip-top Typography: With 37 GB daily traffic, 700 KB full metadata webfont hosting, and surging popularity, Brick selects Linode for its bandwidth, processing power, and reliability

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The immediate popularity of Brick forced Alfred Xing to plan a migration from the shared-hosting on which Brick originated to virtual private servers. Brick handles more than 700,000 requests each day (~37GB of traffic). In its first year, Brick has served more than 200 million requests (almost 10TB) for its exacting, WOFF-compressed copies of the original webfonts, converted without modification to various formats for a better typographical experience. Demand continues to grow. Brick serves webfonts with full metadata and without subsetting, resulting in large files (ranging from 20KB to 700KB). Consequently, Xing sought a cloud host that could satisfy three primary infrastructure criteria: high throughput, sufficient CPU power to quickly generate CSS @font-face rules on-the-fly, and a reliable network. Additionally, Brick preferred a cloud service provider that was reputable, well-known for responsive customer support, and affordable.

Brick is an open-source web-font service that emphasizes rendering quality fonts and font features over compressed-for-fast-downloads web-fonts. Founded by Alfred Xing in 2014, Brick was developed to address the imprecise rendering of web-fonts, particularly those offered by Google Fonts. The service hosts full-feature fonts with metadata, ensuring high-quality typographical details such as kerning and ligatures. Brick's mission is to provide a better typographical experience for users by offering exacting, WOFF-compressed copies of original webfonts. The service has gained significant popularity, handling over 700,000 requests daily and serving more than 200 million requests in its first year.

Linode’s combination of speed (SSD, large 40Gb network) and reliability (large provider with lots of experience and 99.99 percent uptime) met Brick's criteria perfectly. Linode’s infrastructure and track record convinced Alfred Xing it would expertly handle the load. A subsequent offer from Linode to sponsor the open-source project’s server, removing the obligation of even a $10 per month fee, made Xing’s decision even easier. Consequently, Xing migrated Brick from its original, local, shared host to Linode’s 40 Gb network with SSD servers, Intel E-5 processors, doubled RAM, guaranteed uptime, and 11 years of experience as a cloud host.

• Brick’s popularity grew rapidly throughout spring and early summer 2014. When Buffer, a social-media management app, started using Brick at the end of July, traffic more than doubled in terms of both requests and bandwidth.
• Shared hosting could not have handled this load spike despite Brick’s CDN, Fastly, absorbing most of the traffic. The spike, easily handled by Linode’s origin server, would have necessitated Brick moving to a more expensive, higher-capacity plan on shared hosting or being suspended by its initial shared-host for exceeding use limits.
• Linode’s infrastructure has allowed Brick to scale to the size it is today. With dramatically accelerated download speed, Brick users experienced less latency per request, a 43-percent improvement.

• Latency reduced by more than 40 percent.
• CSS generation time dropped by more than a factor of 7 (from 32.4 to 4.4 seconds).
• Bandwidth enables 133 percent increase in daily requests.