Friday, March 7, 2008

Shiny new servers

So it's finally happened. Cubics' software has left the Alberta Foothills and moved to Kansas City.

Our co-loc in Edmonton was having all kinds of problems meeting our service requirements (bandwidth and hardware issues). So during the week of February 18th, we quietly moved all of our traffic to new servers with better network hardware on a much better co-loc over here in Kansas City. Since then, we've added more servers to effectively double our capacity, and we have even more servers already on the way.

So what does this mean?

For our publishers it simply means that we're expecting less down-time and less latency on displaying the ads. It also means that we're better equipped to handle the loads when MySpace comes on-line March 13. We now have a co-loc that can deal with the increased load.

This also gives us more computing power for improved targeting. Better targeting generally means more advertising variety and more room for higher-paying, highly-specific ads.

However, targeting and latency tend to work against each other, b/c every level of added targeting makes it one step more complicated to retrieve the ad. When you're displaying 50,000 ads / minute, even small changes can have a big impact.

We already have some new targeting software, we'll be releasing it soon.

Of course, reporting will also affected, more power means that we'll be providing you with better reporting tools. To whit, we're targeting a release of country-level traffic details sometime next week.

So subscribe to the feed and check back here for more details.

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