Anycast Hosting Made Easy

Total Uptime can make any device hosted in any cloud or data center anywhere anycast enabled in minutes! Even though we don’t offer infrastructure (servers, virtual machines etc.) directly, we give you the power to build the anycast hosting environment you want.

Our ADC-as-a-Service plans each come with a dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 address (virtual IP or ‘VIP’) that is announced globally from all of our POPs. This is the first and most important component of anycast hosting that very few organizations do well.

What is Anycast Hosting?

The general concept behind anycast hosting is the idea that servers or devices placed in geographically different areas all share the same public IP address on the internet. When the IP address space is perfectly balanced with BGP announcements, it draws inbound users/connections to the device that is closest to them.

When users are served by devices that are closest to them, they can experience fast downloads, improved performance, lower latency, lower packet loss, etc. This is the general concept behind many CDNs, although the vast majority still use GEO DNS table lookups to do this. We explain in our article on Global Server Load Balancing why this is not ideal anymore.

Implementing Anycast Hosting

Once you have an anycast IP assigned to your ADCaaS configuration in our panel (and all of our IPs are anycast enabled), you can configure your “real” devices and easily place them behind the anycast IP. Not only does this concept allow you to use any device or cloud anywhere that has an IP or FQDN, but it also shields and protects those devices so end-users or attackers have no idea where they are located, preventing them from attacking or hacking them directly!

But the most important feature of all is the ability to use GEO-Proximity based routing (found in our ADC-as-a-Service PERFORMANCE plan). This gives you the ability to put multiple devices distributed around the globe into one ADCaaS configuration and then manually select where the traffic should go.

A simple concept is shown below for this east coast / west coast deployment.

In the above config, you’ll see that we can send users from the east coast of North America to the New York 1 device and users on the west coast of North America to the Los Angeles 1 device. It can be easily expanded to send users in Europe to a device near them and so-on.

At Total Uptime, we divide the world into the following regions today and are adding more periodically as well.

Not only does this provide a great experience for your users by routing them to the closest device, but our platform allows for automated failover to other nearby devices in the event one fails or gets overloaded.

And best of all, if you need more capacity, even if only in one region, just add more devices! Our load balancer can evenly distribute traffic amongst the devices.

The Benefits

Here are the primary benefits of anycast hosting behind the Total Uptime platform:

• Extreme device flexibility: Use any server or device from any cloud provider, data center or host you trust. In fact, choose two vendors for redundancy! If it has an IP or FQDN, it should work with our platform.
  
  
• Device protection: Device IPs are hidden behind our network, so they cannot be attacked directly. Instead, attackers can only target the anycast IP which enables us to protect you! This also allows you to put up an ACL on your devices so only traffic from Total Uptime reaches it (and maybe your office too).
  
  
• Expand quickly and easily: Need more capacity? Capacity in a different region? Just add more devices on-the-fly and weight them to the right region. No IP change, no DNS updates, it’s that easy! Best of all, if you have more than one device in the same region, we can evenly load balance traffic to them!
  
  
• Perform maintenance anytime: Need to pull a device out for service? No problem! Just disable it to gently drain the connections. Then upgrade as needed!
  
  
• No DNS changes: Unlike many CDN providers who are constantly changing the device IPs given out in DNS to perform many of the activities outlined above, you don’t need to do that! The flexibility of a single anycast IP is that you control everything from one panel.

If you’re looking for more information, don’t hesitate to contact us or click the TRY IT FREE button in the box below to kick the tires on our platform for a couple weeks (with free support too)!