Migrating Our Washington POP to New York

By Cody Arsenault

Published on May 17, 2018

Migrating Our Washington POP to New York

Today, we're excited to announce that we've migrated our Washington POP location to New York. We've done this for a variety of reasons which we'll further discuss in this article. However, we're happy to say that the migration process went smoothly and that all customers will now automatically be able to begin delivering content from our stronger POP in New York.

Why migrate to New York?

Washington worked well as a POP location for a while and speeds were fast, however, we saw that there was room for improvement. There are a few main reasons why we decided to move from Washington to New York:

Greater population
Ability to offer better infrastructure (increased capacity)
Presence in a well-known city

With greater population comes the ability to reach more visitors. Therefore, moving our POP to New York allows our customers to be closer to a greater number of potential visitors thus improving the loading times for a larger percentage of people. Besides being located in an area with a greater population, we were also able to improve our infrastructure for this POP. That means greater capacity, reduced latency, and faster load times.

Population in New York vs Washington

As mentioned above, one of the main reasons to move from Washington to New York is to have access to a greater population and thus provide faster speeds to more people. The population differences between the state of New York and the state of Washington are quite drastic. As of 2017, New York had a population of nearly 20 million people whereas Washington's population was 7.4 million.

Taking this a step further, we can also look at the populations of the cities where the POP was located in Washington and where it is now located in New York. In 2017, Washinton D.C had a population of only 694,000 people, whereas New York City (the current location of our new POP) had over 8.5 million in 2016. With such a large difference in population, it made sense to have a presence in this area.

How to check if content is delivered from New York

Like every other POP, the HTTP response header X-Edge-Location is added to all assets delivered via KeyCDN. In this case, you'll no longer see the Washington POP's uswd identifier but will instead see usny to identify our New York POP location. You can check this via Chrome DevTools or with a curl command such as:

curl -I https://cdn.keycdn.com/img/logo.svg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: keycdn-engine
Date: Thu, 17 May 2018 13:03:15 GMT
Content-Type: image/svg+xml
Content-Length: 12557
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Mon, 26 Sep 2016 12:15:44 GMT
ETag: "57e91170-310d"
Expires: Thu, 24 May 2018 13:03:15 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
X-Cache: HIT
X-Edge-Location: usny
Accept-Ranges: bytes

Summary

We're excited to have migrated this North American POP from Washington to New York in order to reach more people, and secure better infrastructure with greater capacity. As always, if you would like to request a POP in a certain location or a new feature please let us know.