What is short path bandwidth?
=======What is short path bandwidth?
>>>>>>> .r7754I signed up for web hosting with Media Temple. Seems like a great service since I can host all of my sites on one hosting plan. But I wonder, wtf is Short Path bandwidth? A few more hints on their site:
Expand the audience for your creative content by serving more visitors faster than ever before with a Terabyte of multi-routed bandwidth.
I’ve asked them for an explanation and will post their response!
Update - I received their explanation. Here it is:
To answer your question specifically, “Shortpath” bandwidth refers to (mt) Media Temple’s peering relationship with many of the premiere ISPs throughout the Internet. Our network is currently directly peered with AT&T/Yahoo DSL, Adelphia, Earthlink, Cox Communications, and Japan Telecom.
This means that if someone who uses e.g. Adelphia for their Internet connection, wants to look at your site, then that traffic only travels through our network and Adelphia’s. It never goes outside to the Internet. As a result, transfers will be faster, and we can also monitor it better.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:40 am
Hmm, can’t help but think this is starting to lean towards a tiered internet. AT&T/Yahoo DSL, Adelphia, Earthlink, Cox Communications, and Japan Telecom customers are given a preferred route to a site over the none users. This can’t be good.
December 22nd, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Hi Colin,
How is their service overall? I am thinking of switching
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Keith,
Overall I am pretty happy with the service. A lot of people have beef with the term Gridserver being misleading. Technically, we’re not in a grid environment, however putting 100 websites over 10 boxes is better than 10 websites over one box and helps to average out the load. In the first couple months, there were a lot of problems with the speed of their MySQL server, but these seem to be fixed now. Im pretty happy. It could be better, but for the price, my load speed has been sacrificed a little for a larger featureset. If they could get the load speed up, I would highly recommend it to everyone.
February 6th, 2007 at 10:13 am
That still doesn’t explain the bandwidth outside of these ISP’s…is it charged at a set rate instead of included? If so what is that charge? I looked on the site but can’t find any details on it…doesn’t really seem all that clear to me.
February 6th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
[...] I was looking at MediaTemple’s “Grid-Server” hosting, so I wondered, what is short-path bandwidth? Turns out I’m not the only one. [...]
May 12th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
[...] 2. Media Temple Grid Hosting: Media Temple is a different kind of hosting company. They use grid hosting over shared server and short path bandwidth whenever possible. The best part? They give you 1 terabyte of short path bandwidth. Yes, that’s 1,000GB. [...]
May 25th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
I googled > short path bandwith > and look lol. I taught i was a newb while they are naming things. this helpfull
June 19th, 2007 at 4:07 am
I’m a long time user of mediatemple’s services.
To clarify a few things:
-No matter which “path” a user connects to your site through, the only time you recieve a charge is when your monthly bandwidth exceeds your monthly limit (which is, regardless of which service you choose, at least 1TB. Again, that’s a composite total, regardless of what percentage came from which path. Just to give you an idea of how much that it is, it easily survives the “digg effect” more than once in a single month).
-Check out: “How are project costs calculated” for information regarding
how/when/why bandwidth warnings are sent to you.
-Containers: I was confused at first to what a container was exactly. In short, its a security measure. Unlike other shared hosting services (Dreamhost for example) where if you pull an idiot and crash your server, then everyone on that server goes down. Whereas on mt only your site goes down (and quickly reboots). I’ve never managed to crash a container (and I’ve tried for security and assurance purposes). I’ve also never lost any data from them either. Simply replace the word container with “mini-server” and you get the idea.
-GPU (”Grid Processing Units”): I can’t honestly tell you what these are for sure, physically, but I know the concept. The grid is made up of an array of GPU’s. GPU’s have a certain amount of resources dedicated to them (1GB Bandwidth, x amount of memory, x amount of storage etc). These GPU’s are connected together into packages, (generally in groups of 1000 in the case of the base level Grid hosting package I think). If you need more bandwidth or whatever they simply add GPU’s. Think of them as servers that you can plug into each other and add their resources together to form a new, bigger server.
-The Grid: The grid is made up of a large number of GPU’s, and allocates them as necessary. Say your account has a maximum GPU count of 1000 (typical for a base gs package). These are not dedicated to you at all times (otherwise it would be called dedicated hosting), just the ones that you need to meet the demands on your account. The GPU’s that your site is not actively using are available to be “outsourced” (or shared) to other users to handle unusual spikes in activity (such as the digg effect). The idea is to offer supreme scalability, and inter-grid resource allocation, as well as resource monitoring services.
-Uptime, downtime, and latencies: This is my only criticism for them. A lot of people complain of “excessive downtimes.” while I’m sure my servers have experienced downtimes, I’ve never witnessed it first hand. They notify in advance of any planned maintenance etc and the only times I’ve ever heard of “spontaneous” downtime have been isolated incidents in which I could never find multiple people reporting that problem within the same timeframe. As far as load times and latencies it is a bit slow (down speeds are around 100kb/s on average for me, my upspeed is limited by my ISP to a very low level and I rarely see uploads of more than 50kb/s on any server, mt or otherwise, and my mt uploads usually tends to hit that so I can’t say much there). However, considering the excessive storage space, enormous bandwidth and overall feature set of the site I’m quite happy with it.
-Knowledgebase and support: Their knowledgeBase (inhouse FAQ/Tutorial database of sorts) is still growing and is pretty comprehensive at the moment. Much better than it was when I first started. I’d give it 7/10 stars for overall helpfulness as well as quality, but a 6/10 for people new to the process of remote web hosting in general. As for as customer support… I don’t know. I haven’t used it much but the times that I did it didn’t leave a “Wow” impression but I didn’t think “damn that sucks” either. I’ve heard mixed things, to each his own.
In short: I’m very happy with their services and intend to continue my services with them well in the future.
June 22nd, 2007 at 9:43 am
I started considering to move to Media Temple from HostMySite.com. But no matter how amazing their website is, I am still not sure if I should move there.
HostMySite is terrific in terms of Customer Support, it has never taken me more than an hour to have anything fixed, yes anything. MT’s Support is definitely no match for it. It took me quite sometime to get answers to basic queries.
After all, if you intend to start a decent service, using servers which are not inside your country, it helps to have excellent customer support, because the server is the heart of the my service, I just can’t give to somebody I can’t trust.
But yeah, MT is the hot one. Most of the good sites are on MediaTemple. I came here first with a link from TechCrunch, then Mootools, and so many in between.
Though I’m yet to see if HostMySite can survive a Digg. I did survive getting listed on LifeHacker though. But maybe it’s not the same.
October 21st, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I recently moved to MT from DreamHost (about a month or two ago) and it was the best move I could’ve made - the response time, uptime and general service at MT is miles ahead of DH. If you look at DH’s status site, they have had an increasing amount of network issues over the last 6 months or so, and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better. A week does not go past without some major issue and related downtime, loss of emails etc. Of course they don’t offer any guarantees either, unlike MT. The DH databases are hopelessly slow, servers overcrowded and CPU load through the roof on almost every server. I’m sure they’re losing a LOT of clients at the moment.
I still have my domain names hosted at DH because MT does not provide a privacy service (if they did, I’d transfer the whole lot over in a snap) - that would be my only ‘complaint’ with MT, and that’s hardly a complaint.
I’ve used a number of other hosts in the past too - HostMonster (aka BlueHost) was horrible - CPU load extremely restricted, and overuse caused automatic take-down of your entire site temporarily. You can’t rebuild a small MovableType blog on it, it was that bad.
phpwebhosting was ok for a while, but seemed to go downhill about a year ago with downtimes.
There were others not worth mentioning. I’m happy with MT.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
short path bandwidth is, they have some peering with some companies, so they get free bandwidth to the users of those companies, so they say if ur users comes through those network then u can go upto 1tb, bt if the users comes frm other network such as other countries… then its not short path…
this is short path, it doesnt mean they dnt consider other users, but might be they account it differently…