Linode

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.

As an online radio service, AccuRadio faced unique infrastructure challenges due to fluctuating usage rates and the need for flexibility and constancy. Daily usage spikes during lunch and coffee-break times, and listenership varies significantly during events like March Madness and the holidays. Any obstacle preventing users from accessing their favorite channels could lead to dissatisfied users, reduced usage, and revenue loss. AccuRadio's previous infrastructure was non-customizable, inhibiting the ability to measure and interact with its audience effectively. The company needed a flexible and affordable infrastructure to launch new ideas, scale up when necessary, and manage its 1,000-plus channels efficiently. Additionally, as a small company with a dedicated but small tech team, the cloud host had to be reliable and not slow down operations.

The Onion began its online presence last century, using on-site, dedicated servers. However, having encountered system reliability, performance monitoring and application tracking challenges with this hardware, the company shifted to the cloud - and more specifically, Linode. Today, The Onion’s virtual IT infrastructure, which includes 51 Linodes, functions on internal networking between those Linodes. The vast majority of the site’s 11 million distinct monthly visitors connect through this internal networking, Linode’s facilitation of which is critical to optimizing The Onion’s performance. That performance is rooted in a content delivery network, whereby The Onion stores an abundant amount of text, images and other content on origin servers. A dual layer caching system, comprised of individual Varnish servers integrates with the CDN provider, CDNetworks, and serves content for requests from four public-facing servers. These four servers include two application servers and two origin servers that host images. Any user request for content residing on an origin server gets channeled through the Varnish server, which caches the request and also acts as a failsafe in case the origin experiences downtime. Once the Varnish server pulls the requested content in from the origin servers, the CDN and Varnish servers sustain it for 10 minutes before flushing it and refreshing the content. Consequently, the system will deliver content more quickly to subsequent requests than to initial requests. With millions of monthly visitors to The Onion websites, Sinchok’s staff must be diligent in its system monitoring and maintenance. Traffic loads are balanced by using multiple Linodes, connected via private, internal networking. Systems monitoring is done with software such as Graphite and Nagios that runs on individual SSD-powered Linodes. To ensure redundancy and data resiliency, in the event of a failure of services, The Onion frequently backs up its systems using an exclusive, proprietary, backup process. One backup is stored in a server in their Chicago office, and the other is backed up directly to AWS S3.