June 23, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – The Wikimedia Foundation (www.wikimedia.org), the operator and owner of Wikipedia - one of the world’s five largest websites - has signed a contract with EvoSwitch (www.evoswitch.com), the carrier-neutral data center in Amsterdam that operates fully CO2-neutral. As part of the contract, Evoswitch is providing over 300,000 euros of in-kind support in the form of bandwidth and hosting services. Wikimedia will use the Amsterdam site as its HUB for Europe.
The Wikimedia Foundation manages eight distinct, open, wiki based publishing projects, including the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia is consistently ranked one of the top five most visited websites in the world by comScore MediaMetrix, serving billions of page views every month. All Wikimedia’s publishing projects are hosted on a central data infrastructure based in Florida, USA. The complementary part of the infrastructure will now be based in Amsterdam at the EvoSwitch data center.
Hosting Europe
“We're very pleased with EvoSwitch's professional and well secured data center environment, which includes a highly cost-efficient infrastructure in a location that is of great strategic importance to us,” explains Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation. “We will be using the Amsterdam site for caching in particular, aiming to reduce the response time of our project websites in Europe. EvoSwitch will also be a good location for backing up content that is stored at our Florida data center. Finally, we will be relocating European publishing projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter.”
Vibber considers the environmentally friendly nature of EvoSwitch another advantage. “As operators of one of the most heavily accessed web property on the web, we are aware of the impact that the Internet and its energy consumption have on the environment,” explains Vibber. “EvoSwitch’s energy-saving measures, combined with their use of green energy and CO2 compensation are very attractive to us.”
Amsterdam Hosting
The Wikimedia Foundation's hosting infrastructure in Florida encompasses over 300 servers. The Foundation will install about 50 servers at the EvoSwitch site in Amsterdam.
According to Vibber, “The Amsterdam servers will both retrieve the content from the servers in Florida, as well as store it. Web pages can then be displayed to Internet users directly from Amsterdam, which will improve the speed and accessibility of the web pages in Europe significantly. I expect that we will further increase our capacity at EvoSwitch in the near future due to the required storage capacity and new European publishing projects.”
Benefactors Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization with idealistic objectives that are in line with EvoSwitch’s corporate objectives. “We are strong supporters of Wikimedia and their Wikipedia publishing project in particular,” confirms Eric Boonstra, EvoSwitch’s Commercial Director. “The Foundation's operations coincide with the objectives of our own organization, to keep the Internet 'open' and stimulate freedom of expression and the transmission of knowledge via the Internet. This partnership is all the more special to us because of Wikimedia’s faith in EvoSwitch.”
