The Web Servers

Over the JOTI weekend we expect the joti.org website to receive more than 200.000 visitors. To be able to support this sort of traffic we have put together a formidable network of servers around the world. This network will be necessary to ensure that joti.org remains online and available throughout the duration of the JOTI.

The whole project consists of 16 web servers:

• 2 in Germany

• 1 in Australia

  

• 1 in Austria

• 1 in Switzerland

• 1 in South Africa

• 1 in Slovenia

• 1 in Chile

• 2 in Taiwan

• 1 in the Netherlands

• 1 in Japan

• 1 in Sweden

• 1 high powered mail and web server (located in Germany)
  deployed exclusively to run the mail and webmail services.

• 1 high powered web server (located in Germany)
  employed exclusively to run mySQL Database for the dynamic parts of the web site.

The gore details

We have bound 4 different IP Numbers to the domain www.joti.org which will be rotated so as to spread the traffic equally over our primary web servers. If one server were to crash during the JOTI, the user will be allocated a new IP number for joti.org without noticing anything. The same applies for the domains of the mirrors (e.g. ch.joti.org). Other major sites such as aol.com or yahoo.com use a similar system.
To take some of the randomness out of the allocation of the servers and enable users to select the server closest to them (which will most likely provide the best access speed), joti.org asks every user when they first visit the site to choose their language and the closest server. To ensure the failure tolerance of this IP setup we use several domain name servers hosted by different companies.

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