Over the last few years, we’ve been investing heavily in increasing both our network’s capacity and its redundancy.  We now have multiple gigabit upstream providers spread across our three London sites, allowing us to host very high bandwidth sites with a high level of redundancy.

Part of this work is to increase the number of peering agreements that we have in place.  Peering is an arrangement where two networks agree to exchange traffic directly with each other for their mutual benefit, rather than paying to send it by a third party (a transit provider).  Peering has two benefits:

1. it reduces overall bandwidth costs; and
2. it typically provides a much more direct, and therefore quicker, route between the two networks.

Usually the first one is the important one: our marginal cost of bandwidth goes down, and we can reflect these savings in our own prices.

At the end of last year we joined EDGE-IX, a distributed internet exchange that gives us the ability to peer with some networks that we don’t see at other internet exchanges. Most notably, we now have peering in place with two big end-user networks: JANET (the UK’s education and research network) and Virgin Media (formerly NTL).

Sometimes the second point can be important. For example, users of Nominet’s Domain Availability Checker (DAC) are often extremely sensitive to latency, with a few milliseconds making a lot of difference. We received an enquiry from a prospective customer interested in using Nominet’s DAC service. This prompted us to set up a peering arrangement with Nominet, and by providing the customer with a Mac Mini dedicated server in one of our London data centres we were able to offer just about the fastest route physically possible to Nominet’s network.

A company blog has been something that we’ve talked about at Mythic Beasts for some time now, but we’ve never quite got round to it… until now.

One of the frustrating things about being an ISP is that all too often, the only time that your customers notice that you’re actually doing something is when it all goes wrong.  For example, our network is now completely unrecognisable from where it was three years ago, but for the most part the vast amount of work that has gone into this transformation has been completely invisible to our users.

The company has also changed significantly, having acquired the shared hosting business of Black Cat Networks, and more recently, the hosting, virtual server and co-location business of Blue Linux.  Integrating these services has allowed us to improve our own services, but in a lot of cases, this has happened in ways that are not directly visible to our users.

This blog is an attempt to give our customers (and anyone else who cares) some insight into what we’re up to, what’s in the future, and, when things do go wrong, provide a forum for discussing what happened and how we can improve in the future.