Politicker.com, a leading online political news network which operates 17 political news websites across the country, has switched managed hosting providers, leaving Amazon EC2 for Voxel dot Net. Primarily due to unanticipated scalability difficulties with the popular cloud offering, Politicker made a full transition of all its websites to Voxel just five days ahead of the Nov. 4 elections and reports 100 percent uptime and few difficulties, while experiencing enormous spikes in website traffic which created problems for other political news websites.

After experiencing scalability and clustering issues on Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering between June and late October, Politicker contacted Voxel on Oct. 30. Within hours, Voxel had Politicker up and running on its Managed Hosting platform and VoxCAST CDN and saw immediate improvement in stability and uptime. Prior to that time, Politicker had been using Amazon EC2 coupled with Varnish, an open source HTTP caching product and Pound, an open source software load balancer.

“While we were working with Amazon EC2 in the weeks leading up to Election Day, we experienced unacceptable stability issues with our software load balancer and realized we were also paying more than we expected. We knew traffic would increase considerably on November 4 and couldn’t take any chances.” said Austin Smith, Observer Media Group’s Director of Software Development. “We realized that Voxel could provide better uptime and reliability using a hardware load balancer unavailable on EC2, and that their dedicated team of engineers would save us time as well as money.”

Mr. Smith and his development team have chronicled their experiences with EC2 and are willing to share the report as a case study to interested parties, free of cost.

Voxel provides managed hosting and content delivery network services to Politicker’s growing network websites, which follow state and national politics from the ground in 17 states and in Washington, D.C.

In addition to transparent, money-saving pricing, another reason Politicker chose Voxel was its deep experience providing managed hosting and content delivery network (CDN) services that power other popular political websites, including Daily Kos, Air America, and Politicker’s sibling website, Observer.com, the online home of The New York Observer newspaper. In fact, anticipating enormous traffic spikes for its political website clients, Voxel automatically provided additional hardware on demand to ensure its clients would be protected from any difficulties at a lower cost per month than similarly configured EC2 servers.

Observer.com, has used Voxel since March 2007.

Related posts:

1. The Border Observer Hispanic Publication Rejects Iraq Recommendations The Border Observer, in EL Paso, Texas apparently objects to...
2. Hussein Hanging Website Relaunches When the owner of www.HusseinHanging.com started up his blog chronicling...
3. Blog Banned by Google Wins Best Personal Blog Award Samson Blinded, a blog that advocates an ultra-hard-line Israeli approach...
4. Completely Different Concern about the Environment Shown by Survey With Representative Sampling Drawing courtesy of ePolitix website The most recent posting...
5. Poll Says 50 Percent of Men Have Faked an Orgasm According to the results of a new poll from online...