A week ago, The New York Times published an entertaining article by John Markoff and Saul Hansell about Google’s new data centers in Oregon, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power.” Since the link soon may lead to TimesSelect (read: $), I’ll pull one sentence to show the larger point of the article:
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce.
Google’s reticence on the subject makes for some amusing anecdotes in the article, but mostly the article serves as a useful reminder that the Internet still obeys the laws of physics. Heat, energy, and physical space still matter, just in different ways.
Why do Google and others distribute their datacenters around the world?
Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users.
It’s not just search engines who need to deliver at (ahem) light speed. You can’t load google.com or yahoo.com or any other website without first making a DNS request (or several). That’s one reason (there are others, like redundancy & reliability) that OpenDNS runs its service from four geographically distributed locations, with more to come.
OpenDNS isn’t building datacenters, but we’re running our service from some of the best ones in the world. Also, we’re not so secretive that folks need to invoke Voldemort when referring to our company! From the article:
“No one says the ‘G’ word,” said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. “It’s a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.”
A note on being global
We know our coverage of the world beyond the United States can improve. London, England will be the next location online, probably in mid-July. Fortunately, in the short term, connectivity to the United States is quite good, and many Internet users outside the United States are relying on U.S.-based servers for much of their Internet experience already. That’s not ideal, of course. We want to be as fast for someone in Singapore as we are for someone in Seattle, but the speed of light will be a factor for now.
Let us know where in the world you are, as we make our future plans.
Piku
I’m from Romania and I’d like a server in Europe. You can make it in a big node like Viena, Dusseldorf, but London is good too (a bit far)
posted on July 10th, 2006 at 6:22 am
J
I’m from Argentina, and I think a south american server would help the load, besides, I guess the servers by here are cheap compared to say.. london.
A big node could be done in Brazil, maybe in a central ubication (so the geographical distance wouldn’t be that much for most of the countries)
posted on July 10th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Nikolaos Papageorgiou
I am from Greece and your European coverage will be VERY GREATLY appreciated and anticipated
posted on July 11th, 2006 at 1:58 am
Kent Hagan
I just want to say “Thanks!” and hope your future is filled with great success.
posted on July 11th, 2006 at 9:57 am
Daniel P.
A server in Western Europe would be great, I live in Berlin, Germany. ;o)
posted on July 12th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Yvan
Canada here. It appears your traffic is increasing exponentially. Break a leg.
posted on July 17th, 2006 at 11:11 am
josue salazar
I’m from Costa Rica and I just ditched my ISP’s DNS for yours. I’m already noticing the slight speed increase when opening heavily visited sites. Well done!
posted on July 18th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Nikolas
Please support Greece and Europe !
posted on July 19th, 2006 at 3:03 am
Vaggelis
I’m from Greece, too. So I’m rooting for the UK or Italy
posted on July 19th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
ugo
A server in Italy would be great
!
posted on July 22nd, 2006 at 7:45 am
Sven R.
I’m from Belgium, so the UK or the Netherlands would be really good.
posted on July 31st, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Jaime Alvarez
I have tried opendns before but it seemed too slow. Right now pinging 208.67.222.222 gives 192ms from Chile — terra adsl currently assigned ip: 200.89.35.145 — vs 22ms with a local dns.
my ISP’s dns servers are down… I’d switch in a second if you guys were closer.
It seems to me that most ISPs here have a faster connection to the US than to other south american countries, which might be the norm in most countries as the traffic to US is probably bigger than everything else, so a local server in one country won’t make a big difference elsewhere, at least in south america. I hope I’m wrong about this…
Anyway, do you consider some sort of partnership with local companies for providing a faster service in distant countries?
Regards
Jaime
posted on August 22nd, 2006 at 5:28 pm
F.A.S
A server in Madrid would be a good idea.
posted on September 8th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Frukt
Still no European servers? It certainly would be appreciated. Ping to 208.67.222.222 is currently ca 135ms. Thanks for a great service! Tartu, Estonia, Europe.
posted on September 20th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Steven
Having a Singapore server will be great… since it is good geographically location…
Currently speed as below…
Pinging 208.67.222.222 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 208.67.222.222: bytes=32 time=218ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.67.222.222: bytes=32 time=223ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.67.222.222: bytes=32 time=223ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.67.222.222: bytes=32 time=217ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 208.67.222.222:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 217ms, Maximum = 223ms, Average = 220ms
posted on September 30th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Daryl
i just want to ask, if my localisp dns has lower ping times than the opendns.com dns, is my local isp better?
posted on October 13th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
fadil
i’m from kuala lumpur malaysia. why not put a server in MSC (malaysia super corridor)? i would be fantastic. just using opendns yesterday. it was great. yesterday i got some problem accessing www.malaysia-today.net, did sent an email about this. And now its working!!! good job guys.
posted on October 27th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Sushubh
Indian company’s have terrible DNS Servers. I tend to rely more on 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 rather than local servers. Better slow servers than dead servers for me.
posted on November 1st, 2006 at 8:37 am
Vishal Bhargava
Am from India.. you could get tonnes of people using opendns from india if you had servers closer to home.
posted on December 9th, 2006 at 1:20 am
Ahyou
Do care about Europe. Northern Italy here.
posted on February 10th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Manas
One more from India voting for an Asian server
Singapore is a good bet if you ask me.
posted on November 2nd, 2007 at 6:29 am
David
I’m in Australia - ping 185ms… servers in Aus would be good
posted on January 10th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Dnsplease
Malaysia please. Singapore’s close enough if it comes down to that.
posted on May 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 am