I've been thinking about it, and now I'm wondering. Where do they host their servers? Their own NOC? And what kind of connection speed's do they have (and who are their backbone providers)?

It'd be great to know this kind of information for a change :D:agree:

sanjiv, such domains have entire floors filled with their very own servers piped with most likely a direct line internet connection (those that only ISP's have)... In english, they host themselves being the serious type of heavy usage that they need and uptime. And to store all of those databases and emails and such.. it does take multi-floor datacenters to get that flowing nicely.

thought so.. anyone has info on their locations? would be good to pay them a visit some day :D

Actually I believe google used Exodus, I think Microsoft may have done too, not sure if they still do now that C&W bought most of the Exodus DCs though.

A quick check showed Exodus actually hosts Yahoo! and other sites like sun microsystems, fuji xerox, sony, american airlines and more (http://www.exodus.net/clients/index.html).

But what about other huge sites like google, microsoft, and even altavista? Exodus hosts MSN, so would that include MicroSoft?

Hmm, looks like Exodus -does- host MicroSoft (http://www.exodus.net/partners/microsoft.html) - they're partners.

So that leaves us with google and altavista :D

I have wondered about this myself. Now I know.

FYI, the Exodus/Microsoft Cage is more secure than the white house - it's like Area 51 infact.....I tried visiting it and everyone said "I have no idea what you're talking about"

From what I hear, MS has their own 10K square feet of datacenter space and is paying exodus A LOT of money (it's a single digit, with about a dozen zeros following it)...

....but rumors will be rumors ;)

Heh well that's expected I guess.. One minite of downtime's gonna be costly for them, heh. Exodus probably locked up 10 of their best techs in their cage with unlimited coffee supply, lol :D

http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_28.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/library/images/gifs/backstage/bkst_15_img1.jpg - that looks like one hella advanced DC heh ;)

Looks good.. its no wonder they've got -100%- uptime.

On another note, anyone seen a host that uses multiple dedicated OC-192's for connectivity?

Google have three or four datacentres - they run almost standard desktop boxes, but *lots* of them clustered for different operations (web, db, spider). If one goes down - no problem - they have 999 other to take over. The fact that they are Linux shop makes this *very* cheap.

MS have thier own datacentre but downloads are outsourced. They used to use connexion but now its all on Akamai's distrubuted network. Their DNS is also handled by Akamai after some techie (now probably sacked or in Bill's dungeon) misconfiged a DNS box about a year ago taking a load of sites down.

Yahoo are hosted worldwide. So for example the UK site is just off LINX (London Internet Exchange). They also have a sophisticated regionalised system to put out images, and other stuff that isn't pages - e.g. UK, France and Germany's images are hosted on a european image server. This is hosted, again, by Akamai.

I don't think Google use almost standard boxes, they are standard boxes full stop, there was an article somewhere where they talked about it and gave links to their suppliers.

They touch on it in this interesting interview - http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/03/1352239&mode=thread&tid=95

makes one dream, eh

:eek:

hmm, what's the site of this Akamai company? They seem big o_O

I think every big company should give TimPD $1,000,000,000 for a NOC. :)

http://www.akamai.com/

Suppose Microsoft uses Win2k servers?

:rolleyes:

Wonder if they pay for it, too....

Originally posted by CChard
Suppose Microsoft uses Win2k servers?

:rolleyes:

Wonder if they pay for it, too....

Nope, we now use .NET Server exclusively (at least as of about a month ago).

Edit: I suppose I should add that I'm a developer on the Microsoft.com team as well. Shh, don't tell anyone :).

Google explains their technology here (http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html) :cool:

Im also a developer on the Microsoft team. Want to know something interesting (and I kid you not). Although Microsoft is developing and maintaining Win2k servers and having those run well, there's still a healthy percentage of their sites running on UNIX boxes. The information leaked about a couple months ago and MS has been on their feet trying to get rid of them.

i thought msft had thier own like "datacenter" in chicago?

and how the heck are you a developer on the microsoft team? thats kinda i dunno far fetched ot me anyways

interactive, no no.. not WITH the OS team.. I'm on the MSDN team.. a group of programers for a local company here in town in joint programming writing code on the .NET platforms and getting used to this new .NET code (which is a nightmare, but not too bad). MS did some very poor marketing with their .NET package and having to pay the consequences.

... and yes, their datacenter is in chicago, but that's not where ALL their servers are.. they have systems ALL over the nation and overseas.

ya i know that they are all spread out...on the programming thing i interpeted you wrong...im like "wthell is he talking about" plus people who design the os's call them selves "engineers" to me their not engineer's but you know. as for like servers being spreads out hotmail (which for those of you who dont know is owned my msn.com which is owned by microsoft (or so i believe ;-))) anyway they have like 600 servers spread out all over the world or something insane like that....considering how large it is though it doesn't seem like that many

Originally posted by interactive
and how the heck are you a developer on the microsoft team? thats kinda i dunno far fetched ot me anyways

Who are you referring to, me or ecpHosting?

I happen to be a developer in the PCMP group and my team is one of several who are responsible for writing the tools that are used for maintaining the website.

Why would it be so farfetched? You'd be suprised the number of talented people here.

I believe you can Find on Netcraft somewhere what each MS domain is running, there are quite a few on *nix still, Hotmail used to be FreeBSD I believe till MS took over and when they did it all fell to pieces when they first transfered to Windows as you may remember if you have a Hotmail account.

I believe (or atleast been told) that hotmail still runs FreeBSD, atleast on some servers.

I don't have much faith in windows hosting, but wouldn't the amount of traffic eventually bring a windows system to it's knees?

Originally posted by Allyn
but wouldn't the amount of traffic eventually bring a windows system to it's knees? Yeah - just like a *nix system

From Microsoft:

Hardware
Four dedicated gigE uplinks provide a total of 4000 MB uplink capacity
Multiple OC48s provide connectivity to the Internet
Runs on Compaq Proliant ML570 and Dell Power Edge 6450 servers with four PIII-Xeon/700 Mhz processors, 1 GB Memory, 120 GB Content Capacity, and 34 GB Log Capacity each

If memory serves me right, they have several OC-192's that link up with those Gig-E's. I remember the UUNet map had four of them going up to Redmond. :)

James

Originally posted by Allyn
I believe (or atleast been told) that hotmail still runs FreeBSD, atleast on some servers.

I don't have much faith in windows hosting, but wouldn't the amount of traffic eventually bring a windows system to it's knees?

Let me put it this way... I am a programmer in the vast MSDN team. I know the ins and outs of a majority of OS's that Microsoft Develops as I am also on their Beta team (got all the .NET stuff as well) and STILL my preference of choice for hosting is UNIX.

'nuff said.

Granted, there are still some features in WinOS and in IIS that UNIX has yet to attain, but there are also STABILITY and SPEED improvements that are found in UNIX that WinOS has yet to attain.