geoscalingstatus.com now redirects to our Twitter account 

We have redirected geoscalingstatus.com to our http://twitter.com/geoscaling Twitter account.
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DDOS attack on GeoScaling and recovery 

Hello again and Happy New Year,

We determined that GeoScaling experienced downtime due to a massive attack on all our IP addresses. The attack was mostly likely targeted towards one of our users, not GeoScaling. Unfortunately the standard response datacenters have when dealing with such large attacks is to null route the servers. This is the reason why all of GeoScaling was down. Normally the system can function even if all but one servers are down.

Going forward we are working on improving our infrastructure. While such an attack might happen again in the future, we are putting a better infrastructure in place to deal with such problems.

Right now all services have returned to normal. We moved two of our nameservers to new datacenters and we expect to continue upgrades throughout January.

We deeply apologize for this situation and we are doing whatever we can to mitigate such events in the future.

Thank you,
The GeoScaling team
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GeoScaling downtime 

On December 31st 2011 and January 1st 2012 GeoScaling experienced multiple outages. This is unacceptable and we are working hard to make sure it will never happen again. This is the first time we had a major outage since we launched more than three years ago.

GeoScaling was designed to be fault tolerant and continue working even if multiple servers are down. Unfortunately this time our safeguards did not work. A series of unprecedented events which started when one server went down brought the whole system down. We are in the process of analyzing what happened exactly. We are installing better monitoring systems and we are also migrating at least one of our nameservers to another datacenter.

We are very sorry about this situation and hope it will never ever happen again.

Ovi from the GeoScaling team
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Updated SSL certificate 

We installed a new SSL certificate on geoscaling.com. During upgrade web server was down but all DNS services continued to work correctly.

In other "news", GeoScaling has been running fine since the last blog post.
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GeoScaling Testimonial 

In the never ending quest to give the user the fastest initial page load response, we came across GeoScaling's location based DNS service. Last year we had searched for such functionality but the available offerings were prohibitively expensive. When our servers cost as low as 10 dollars a month for a virtual slice of a Unix server, there is no way 400 a month fits into the budget for DNS services. That being said, we did not look at GeoScaling because they have a free offering, it was strictly for their advertised location based IP resolution. Initially I was a bit skeptical, but without too much fiddling I now have a "phpish" script that does serve the IP of the closest server, fails over if it is down, and accepts our call into their servers to take a location / server "offline" if we are about to do a software upgrade. We monitor 4 different servers (CA,TX,GA,IL) from 3 US locations (monitis) for initial page load time. After tweak out all we could with compression, delayed JS loading, "optimizing" our flex application bootstrap swf (all of our app is in flex modules so only the module in use is loaded on demand), it became painfully obvious that the remaining nut to crack was latency caused by the distance to each datacenter. I have the numbers / stats to prove it, but expect a 2 to 5 x gain with geo based DNS (assuming at least 3 regional servers). Put another way, our goal is to have the initial page load take 1 second (before anything is cached in the browser), and we found that going to the wrong (farthest) server sent those times up to 5 seconds or beyond when we were achieving a second or less testing from Clearwater Florida to our Dallas or Atlanta servers.

I offered to write this testimonial considering I believe what GeoScaling offers to be unique. I have been using Dnsmadeeasy for many years, and have never had a problem. They are just now going to beta their geo based solution, but I doubt it will offer the flexibility of be able to have the resolution be tailored to exactly what you want via the php script and client uploaded data. Also be aware a large portion of the geo DNS offerings are country based, some are region based, but very few offer true lat/long distance based resolution.

If you have questions about our exact setup or results, or how we achieved it, I can be reached at keitht@sasimedia.net
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GeoScaling is fine 

All systems are running fine. In fact, they are running fine for close to 3 years now. Boring, isn't it? :)

Don't worry if we don't write anything on the blog. It just means everything is working great.

Have a nice day,
GeoScaling Team
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Speedup and City information lookup 

Hi everybody,

This blog will talk about new GeoScaling DNS2 features and general DNS issues. I won't describe what DNS2 is, you can read about that on our main page.

What I will tell you on the other hand is what we've been working on these past two days:

- we added redirection at the city level. You can now redirect users based on their country, city, latitude and longitude. Such a city info lookup costs 2 credits. We'll update the wiki with documentation on this feature shortly.

- we optimized country and city lookup; we should now be able to handle many more concurrent users with a low latency. We also lowered the cost of a simple country lookup to 1 credit.

Ovi
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