What’s an edge location?

If you create a website that’s based on the other side of the world, you’ll need to send internet data between you and that server. 

That transmission happens at the speed of light — but even the speed of light is not immediate.

To make a round trip from you to that website and back, it takes light around 200ms.

Each response from a link takes more than a second, simply because of the fundamental laws of physics.

This is why most companies employ Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

To put it in simpler terms, there’s not one server that you’re interacting with — there’s many, and you get redirected between them based on your location or their current load.

That’s exactly why a lot of companies use CDN — convenience and efficiency.

That’s also what we do.

And that’s exactly what an edge location is — a location that expands our core capabilities.

Until recently, we had three — in the US, Germany, and Australia.

Introducing South Korea

We noticed a large number of our users from the Asia Pacific region (APAC) — our largest volume of users by a pretty wide margin — were primarily connecting to our Australian servers, significantly straining it.

So we’re happy to announce that we now also have servers in South Korea!

Our new South Korean server (in orange) has almost completely taken on the volume of users from our Australian server (in blue).

Previously, APAC users could use our servers (mainly our Australian one), but they were all quite far away. Now, the region is routed through Seoul.

By doing this, we can reduce latency for users to 5ms for cache hits, and 250ms for cache misses.

💡
It takes 5 data roundtrips between your browser and our servers to follow a link. 

With a server nearby, it’s practically instantaneous.

Actually, all users can benefit from this change

When you set up a new domain, you’ll get the suggestion to use our new IP address:

207.174.61.1

With it, our links and domains will automatically be redirected to the nearest server.

If you are still using these outdated IP addresses:

  1. 52.21.33.16 
  2. 52.59.165.42
  3. 52.2.26.64

You’ll miss out on all the benefits our new IP address offers.

With 207.174.61.1, your links and domains will automatically be redirected to the nearest server.

So please, update to 207.174.61.1 to benefit from the increase in performance.

👨‍💻
Recently, we had an incident with our new Seoul servers.

We usually run our services on Intel-based c7i CPUs.

This time, we decided to experiment with AMD c7a CPUs, as we’re always trying to optimize our users’ experience.

Unfortunately, we found that AMD CPUs’ performance when handling the heavy encryption needed to establish secure connections was twice as slow as Intel CPUs.

Going back to Intel’s C7i CPUs thankfully resolved the problem.

Don’t forget to upgrade!

We’re always looking for ways to improve Short.io, so adding the South Korean servers was a no-brainer. 

For APAC users specifically, this change will significantly improve their experience when using our platform.

But we’ve made sure that everyone can benefit from this upgrade. 

Use our new IP address for improved latency, better reliability, and a smoother experience.

Remember: 207.174.61.1!