Tip-top Typography: With 37 GB daily traffic, 700 KB full metadata webfont hosting, and surging popularity, Brick selects Linode for its bandwidth, processing power, and reliability
Customer Company Size
Startup
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Linode
- Fastly
Tech Stack
- SSD
- Intel E-5 processors
- PHP
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Virtual Private Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Brick is an open-source web-font service that emphasizes rendering quality fonts and font features over compressed-for-fast-downloads web-fonts. Founded by Alfred Xing in 2014, Brick was developed to address the imprecise rendering of web-fonts, particularly those offered by Google Fonts. The service hosts full-feature fonts with metadata, ensuring high-quality typographical details such as kerning and ligatures. Brick's mission is to provide a better typographical experience for users by offering exacting, WOFF-compressed copies of original webfonts. The service has gained significant popularity, handling over 700,000 requests daily and serving more than 200 million requests in its first year.
The Challenge
The immediate popularity of Brick forced Alfred Xing to plan a migration from the shared-hosting on which Brick originated to virtual private servers. Brick handles more than 700,000 requests each day (~37GB of traffic). In its first year, Brick has served more than 200 million requests (almost 10TB) for its exacting, WOFF-compressed copies of the original webfonts, converted without modification to various formats for a better typographical experience. Demand continues to grow. Brick serves webfonts with full metadata and without subsetting, resulting in large files (ranging from 20KB to 700KB). Consequently, Xing sought a cloud host that could satisfy three primary infrastructure criteria: high throughput, sufficient CPU power to quickly generate CSS @font-face rules on-the-fly, and a reliable network. Additionally, Brick preferred a cloud service provider that was reputable, well-known for responsive customer support, and affordable.
The Solution
Linode’s combination of speed (SSD, large 40Gb network) and reliability (large provider with lots of experience and 99.99 percent uptime) met Brick's criteria perfectly. Linode’s infrastructure and track record convinced Alfred Xing it would expertly handle the load. A subsequent offer from Linode to sponsor the open-source project’s server, removing the obligation of even a $10 per month fee, made Xing’s decision even easier. Consequently, Xing migrated Brick from its original, local, shared host to Linode’s 40 Gb network with SSD servers, Intel E-5 processors, doubled RAM, guaranteed uptime, and 11 years of experience as a cloud host.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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