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Our multi-homed network is the result of years of work and around a quarter of a million pounds total investment in core routing and access equipment. It means we are able to route our customers' traffic through the best path for their visitors, and are able to continually control our own routing policies.
Click the diagram below to download a PDF version.
Design principles
We have aimed for two very simple principles when designing our network: that it should be capable of taking the most abusive traffic patterns that we have encountered, and that it should be capable of withstanding the failure of any single piece of core equipment (routers or distribution switches).
Memberships
We are a member of RIPE, the European regional internet registry, and have a total of 20000+ IPv4 addresses and AS35425 under our direct control. This means we are independent of any one transit supplier, and are in control of our own network. We are also members of several peering points who allow us direct routes to many UK destinations, and Nominet, the UK domain registrar.
RIPE
The RIPE NCC is one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) providing Internet resource allocations, registration services and coordination activities that support the operation of the Internet globally.
Nominet
Founded by five people in 1996, Nominet is a non-profit company who undertake the management of the .uk domains and registry.
Linx
Linx is an established internet service provider and content delivery service provider for operating seperate networks in London and Manchester.
LONAP
LONAP is a Layer-2 Internet Exchange Point (IXP) providing the physical infrastructure and connections for its members which exchange traffic with each other efficiently.
Edge IX
Edge-IX offers conventional peering services through its high performance fibre network across the UK.
IX Leeds
IXLeeds, is a neutral not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) based in Leeds and provides a Layer-2 platform to connect and share IP traffic using BGP-4.
Designed for abuse
It's an unfortunate fact of planning a commercial hosting network that we couldn't plan simply for the capacity that we expected our customers to need.
Instead we had to budget for abusive traffic patterns that can exceed our normal usage by a factor of 5 or 10. This does also leave plenty of spare capacity for when a customer's site is an unexpected hit.
