First of all, I'm still a happy customer so far. I've seen good technical support, even when I was the one causing the trouble. You guys care about your customers. My first customer that I transferred to my account with you, everything went smoothly. This is a site with a lot of video content (and I mean a lot) for which I architected a solution based on ASP.NET MVC 3 with the video hosted on Amazon S3/CloudFront to get a very good speed in the video and streaming and such which was most important to my customer. Site runs great, customer is happy, I am happy. Now, however, I've uploaded an older customer's site to a fresh site (without transferring all the DNS stuff just yet. Doing preliminary testing now) but this time video is part of the site, but at the time there was no need for a solution like my earlier story. Video is hosted by the site as simple files (although individual files are fairly large, there's not that many of them). On this site, the video is slow, it downloads slow, it starts up slow and it hickups as it needs to "buffer". I'm doing some more testing right now but from what I can tell bandwidth seems to be capped at about 160-180 KiB/s (doing an upload from the current host which is my own server in my own space with my own gigabit link to Belgium's finest BNIX link from which I can do pretty much 8MB/s transfers to nearby hosts). Now, I'm not suggesting that I think it's necessary to rebuild Internet2 here, but I'd think that at least when a single user visits the site to get to a video it should at least burst to the near-home-user-internet-downlink-speed, dontcha think? Actually, done a second test. First test was uploading using FTP at 160-180 KiB/s. Now downloading from the HTTP side is 85KB/s max (according to IE's download dialog). Is this a temporary problem? Is someone aware of this issue? Is some provisioning being done where an extra route is being laid or a new peering agreement is in the works where you can say "yes, this is a temporary situation" or is it understandable that this is the sort of maximum speed that I'll get from this? I'm getting both behaviors from W01 and W02 (apparently I have a site on each). Of course, this is me from Belgium and we live 200ms away from you (can't beat that pesky speed-of-light thing) but transfer speed shouldn't be affected that much, should it?
Unfortunately web performance and web speed is a very tricky thing to diagnose. Keep in mind there are a lot of moving parts here. There is your own local network, your computer, our servers, and all the other hops/routers that is between you and our servers. And as you pointed out, being in such a far away place can hinder the performance on your site at least from your point of view. So let me tell you this, we do not cap upload or download speed. What ever speed you posses we can pretty much match since our backbone is running on fiber optics. That being said let me first test out your site and see what I find on my end. Obviously my results maybe a little skewed since I am geographically closer to the server then you are. Why don't you give me the URL and any instructions I will need to replicate the latency on my end. I'll get back to you and tell you what I find.
