Image white-outs
Friday, February 6th, 2004
We’ve had two ten-minute glitches in the last 24 hours with disappearing ad images. These outages have occured on both image servers we run at Interland, so it appears these outages are upstream from our servers.
Our serving strategy has been revised significantly in the last month. Now the ad management and javascript serving is handled by two servers at the most expensive host around, Rackspace, with the images being served from Interland, where bandwidth is cheaper.
This means that if outages occur, the adstrip framework and text will still load and the actual loading of all blog pages will not be degraded.
If anyone is interested in eliminating the risk of brief image outages, we’ll gladly forward a CGI to cache ads on your server. It is simple to install and the cache updates only once a day
or when new ads are added. I know that as numbers grow, a number of bigger bloggers are reconsidering their hosting options, so if you have any tips please pass them along.