Direct Connections to IX and Low-Cost Bandwidth

For this post, we’d like to make two announcements right off the bat. Firstly, we are now offering a new service which is currently one-of-a-kind in Russia: Remote Points of Presence. This service shortens the route your online project takes to an Internet exchange point to just a few clicks in our control panel. Secondly, we’ve rolled back the prices for additional guaranteed bandwidth; these savings of up to 30% should help ease anyone’s spring fever!

By 2020, video will be the primary type of content exchanged over the Internet: both by companies and casual users. Although we could wait out the expected three years, we’ve decided to start offering solutions for projects that are ready to follow this trend now.

The new service, Remote Points of Presence, lets you set up a communications hub in Moscow or St. Petersburg with a direct connection to Internet exchange points within a day. We offer not only datalinks to IX, but the ability to lease the required hardware infrastructure. That’s what makes this a unique offer for the Russian market. With this service, connections are now available to the biggest Internet exchange points in Russia—MSK-IX and SPB-IX—and we will be adding to this list in the future.

A point of presence can be set up in a Tier III data center from one of several dedicated servers or virtual machines from Selectel’s cloud platform. In this case, the process is fully automated: you just have to make a couple of clicks in the control panel.

The solution doesn’t incur major expenditures on servers or network equipment, plus you avoid having to sign and maintain contracts with the full gamut of vendors (data center, telecommunications carriers, IX). Our service also shortens the time it takes to enter an IX to one day (setting up a remote point of presence on your own can take a month or longer).

Direct connections to IX let you improve network connectivity and optimize network paths, which in turn creates faster responses for online resources, lets you save on payments to transit and higher-level data carriers, and releases you from data restrictions. Additionally, this gives you the opportunity to establish local cooperation with authoritative domain name servers for COM, RU, and NET domains (to name a few) and F.root, I.root, J.root, and K.root root domains, which lowers the chances of issues arising from DDoS attacks and backbone connection failures.

This service should be of particular interest to content creators and content providers, especially those dealing with video. This isn’t just video hosting or a video-on-demand application; today’s generators of video traffic are cloud communication services with teleconferencing capabilities, security applications (streaming video surveillance), education platforms and platforms for online broadcasting (like e-sport competitions), online games, and more. On top of that, this service makes it easier to geographically expand a CDN.

Starting in March, we’ll also be offering lower prices on additional Internet bandwidth. Currently, this service has three options: 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gbps. Prices will be reduced by 20-30% depending on the particular bandwidth. This is not a temporary sale, but the new standard price, and it will be effective for both old and new users.

In conclusion, we’d like to share some statistics with you. Over the past two years (from 2014 to 2016), the amount of traffic generated by Selectel clients doubled. To manage this growing workload, we increased the capacity of our uplinks 2.5-fold and doubled the channel capacity between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Selectel’s hosting and cloud platforms were transferred to switch equipment that supports port speeds up to 40 Gbps, and the capacity of network channels between data centers was increased several times over. As you can see, we are actively working to make sure your projects keep up with the times.