Where is the BBS hosted?

meta
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As I understand it, boingboing.net is hosted in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A couple traceroutes from different boxes indicate that’s still true.

bbs.boingboing.net though resolves to the same IP as discourse.org . As far as I can tell, that’s hosted in Freemont, California. Is that correct?

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“Mu.” Who owns the IP address, and what hardware that resolves through and to, are highly decoupled. The latter may be widely distributed; that’s part of what the whole cloud concept is about.

A host is a host, from coast to cost
And no one will talk to a host that's close
Unless the host that isn't close
Is busy, hung, or dead...

(To the tune of the Mr. Ed theme song.)

3

BBS is the second of the three major Discourse launch partners (after HowToGeek), and so is hosted by the Discourse guys. Meta, Try, HTG, and BBS are all on the same hardware. Details here.

2 Likes
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The specific post you want is this one:

http://blog.discourse.org/2013/03/discourse-outage-thursday-march-14th-2013/

Hurricane Electric aka http://he.net

Fremont 2 colocation facility
Virtual Tour: Hurricane Electric's Fremont 2 Colocation Facility

Our 208,000 square foot Fremont 2 Colocation Facility is located in the heart of Silicon Valley with easy access from two major freeways (880, 680). Three international airports (SJC, OAK, SFO) are a short distance away.

5

Mmm, hardware porn.

Part of what got me wondering is I remembered Cory mentioning years ago (probably on This Week in Tech) that one of the reasons Boing Boing is hosted in Toronto rather than somewhere in the US is DMCA takedowns.

I think the idea was that lawyers might send a takedown notice over something legitimate (DeCSS, that Bluray code, game console unlocking, etc) posted on Boing Boing. Boing Boing might be willing to tell them to piss off, but the lawyers could also send a takedown notice to the colocation host. That host would likely take down the entire site rather than risk liability. Canadian law still operates on a notice-and-notice system rather than a notice-and-takedown system so if someone sends a takedown notice to Boing Boing’s host, all that host is required to do is forward it to Boing Boing.

1 Like
6

Yeah, hosting in the US is a bummer what with PRISM and DMCA and all. :cry:

But I have to have the colocation within reasonable driving distance in case some of our colocated hardware explodes. And I live in California, so…

We colocate because the performance is so much better than what you get with cloud services, and we like controlling our hardware.

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