RaDaR: A Scalable Architecture for a Global Web Hosting Service

As commercial interest in the Internet grows, more and more companies are offering the service of hosting and providing access to information that belongs to third-party information providers. In the future, successful hosting services may host millions of objects on thousands of servers deployed around the globe. To provide reasonable access performance to popular resources, these resources will have to be mirrored on multiple servers. In this paper, we identify some challenges due to the scale that a platform for such global services would face, and propose an architecture capable of handling this scale. The proposed architecture has no bottleneck points. A trace-driven simulation using an access trace from AT&T’s hosting service shows very promising results for our approach.