Incentive schemes

May 31st, 2012 by

So I had reason to transfer 350GB of data from a server hosted by Mythic Beasts to a USB drive in order to back up and ship the data to a bandwidth deprived customer. For reasons of my convenience I thought I’d do this from my home office where I have a 10Mbit ADSL connection provided by a small reputable and non bargain basement ISP and a 60Mbit connection provided with an entirely different technology. I split the source files roughly 2:1 between the connections and downloaded them with rsync tunnelled over ssh. Over the next 26 hours the download ran, 99.6GB over the DSL line (average speed 8Mbits),150GB over the cable (average speed 12Mbits).

I’ve taken the bandwidth graph from the server and included it above. The blue box is the DSL line data, the wavy line the cable. You’ll notice the DSL line runs flat out the whole time with it’s performance never wavering, the cable is clearly limited by congestion. This isn’t an issue on the server side – we’ve 100Mbits from the server up to to the router then 1Gbit out to the peering exchanges (LoNAP and Edge-IX) where we pick up the DSL and cable providers.

The main difference here is the incentive scheme. My DSL provider gives me a bandwidth cap and charges me for additional bandwidth over that limit. Consequently they have an incentive to make my line as fast as possible because that makes it easier for me to pay them more. It also means the only other users of the network who are using large quantities of traffic are paying their fair share which provides the money to upgrade the network. My cable connection is ‘unlimited’ which means performance is constrained by congestion caused by other users. The flat-lines are caused by the rate limiting confusing ssh and the connection essentially stopping until I had to intervene restart the transfer. I’ve included these because fast though 60Mbits may be, I’m not going to sit and babysit for the full 350GB download to complete.

This is why servers supplied by Mythic Beasts come with fast connections, bandwidth allowances and excess fees. We want to make your connection as fast as possible so you can easily spend more money with us.

Team Building

May 22nd, 2012 by


Yesterday Mythic Beasts and selected friends went to the Cambridge beer festival. Whilst there we saw a poster put up by the Son Of Sid brewery for a beer called codebreaker with a mysterious set of non-sensical characters at the bottom.ย  It took about a minute of staring knowingly before one of us said ‘well it’s not a substitution cipher’, followed by ‘I wish I had a laptop with me’ and before we knew it we had a crack team trying to break the cipher.

If you’d like to have a go yourself we suggest you get down to the beer festival, the breweries twitter feed says you have until Saturday to work it out. At the end there’s going to be a draw from all the successful entries to win a polypin of beer.

I don’t think we managed to save the world from a Hollywood style alien invasion but we had fun and drank beer at the same time.

EDIT: The official brewery twitter feed says,

Bob Mitchell โ€@sonofsidbrewery

One entry so far in the codebreaker competition @cambeerfest
12:27 PM - 22 May 12 via web ยท Details 

that was team Mythic.

Django installed on sphinx

May 11th, 2012 by

A customer wanted to use Django (this is a web application framework for the Python language), but found it wasn’t installed on their hosting server (which happened to be sphinx in this case). A couple of emails to support@mythic-beasts.com later, and they were up and running within 24 hours.
The moral of this story: if you’re trying to do something with a Mythic Beasts service, and seem to have hit a brick wall, do get in touch. If it’s at all sensible, we’ll try to make it possible, and if it’s not sensible, we’ll let you know!

Multi-year registration for .co.uk; new Top Level Domains

May 1st, 2012 by

Nominet is the domain name registry that ultimately controls .co.uk, .org.uk, and most other second-level domains under .uk. Till now, they have only allowed domain names to be registered for 2 years – no more, no less.

That changed today, 1st May 2012, and so we pleased to be able to offer Nominet domain registrations for up to 10 years. As well as receiving a discount for the longer registration period, you can rest assured that your domain is yours with no need to renew till 2022!

Or, going in the other direction, if you have a short-term project that deserves a .uk domain name, you could register for just 1 year.

We’ve also today added a bunch of new Top Level Domains that we can support, including .tel, .au, .nz, and extending our coverage of European countries: here are the full details of supported domains and prices. (Even more Top Level Domains may be available on request – email us if you don’t see what you’re after!)