Anycast Routing for Web Hosting: Speed Boost or Just Overkill?

Have you ever experienced slow internet connections upon opening a website? I quickly grasped the feeling as well. This is how I learned about Anycast routing. Although it sounded big and complicated, I asked myself the following question: Does this route truly make websites faster? Or is it just an additional job?

What is Anycast?​

Think about a multi site with lots of shops in different cities. When a customer comes all the way to the front, he will always go to the closest store. This works the same for Anycast.

Your website runs on multiple servers - so a user would always connect to the server that is the most close to them. Overall, the closer the server is, the more quickly it can render. That's it!

Why do people use Anycast?​

From my experience with Anycast, the reason people use it is simple to do it for the first time is that I learned:

• All the time, the websites will load faster
• If one server goes down, the other server remain - they just keep going
• It can do better under a DDoS because the traffic is bridging to different servers.
• There are many more

However these three points are central in testing and decide trying to hire an anycast routing service.

So yes, it does aid in many scenarios.

Here’s the straight truth​

Use Anycast if:

• Your visitors are from all over the world
• You want your website to always be up and available
• You’re utilizing an DNS, a CDN, or a service that has a lot of traffic
• You want to decrease the delay for remote users

Do NOT utilize Anycast if:

• You have only a couple servers
• Your traffic is coming from primarily one region
• You want something simple and inexpensive

Sometimes for small websites, Anycast is even overkill.

Things that night go wrong​

Nobody bothers to tell you this up front, but:

• Anycast is a non-trivial setup
• You need multiple servers, which costs more
• Internet routing is subject to change, and this is confusing and could cause delay issues.

It is not always straightforward.

So, is it worth it? If your website gets global visitors - yes, Anycast can speed it up considerably. But if your site is small or intended for local traffic, Anycast is over the top. You don't need it separately.

Take a moment and consider: Do I need this, or do I just want it because it sounds cool?