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I like the idea of Zones on different continents.

Not only can this provide faster responses for each continent, but it also enables peak times in one time-zone to be supplemented by resources in off-peak time-zones. Though I guess the latter is true of any cloud infrastructure, even if centralized.

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This would need some sort of "global load balancing" prob using DNS. Zones in Brightbox are similar to Availability Zones on EC2, isolated but interconnected datacentre facilities within the same city.

There are 2 ways to do it, one is called anycast and the other is using DNS and GeoIP to split responses depending on where the request is coming from (e.g. request from USA - return DNS entry for a US-based VPS).

We currently have two Zones in Manchester, UK - we plan to launch additional regions in separate geographical locations throughout Europe and the US in due course. http://beta.brightbox.com/beta#faqs

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