QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Sat 30th July 2011, 6:19pm)
Well, I've been watching ed.ch for a few hours.
It goes up and down like a yo-yo. So does their forum.
What are they running it on now, a Commodore 64?
The only servers we know about are the connection between Hetzner in Germany (85.10.206.54) and CloudFlare based in California. Garrett is claiming at least one additional server between the actual content and Hetzner. My guess is that there are about 100 hops total, involving at least one additional non-U.S. country besides Germany.
If you request a page that isn't cached at CloudFlare, or the CloudFlare cache has timed out and has to be freshened by them, then the packets have a long and treacherous journey before you see the page. Also, there may be content on the requested page that is
not cached by CloudFlare, since it only caches relatively static content. If that's the case, the page cannot be delivered until that content is fetched. When everything is perfect for the page you requested, then CloudFlare sends it to your browser. If a router somewhere drops a packet, it has to be requested again. Every packet has to make it before CloudFlare delivers the page to your browser.
That's what I believe is happening, but it's mainly a guess. Why do they do this? They want to be so clever that no one can ever find the server that hosts the content. And even though the two main controllers of the content are Zaiger in Massachusetts and Garrett in Michigan, they want to be able to say that the content is not hosted in the U.S. and therefore U.S. laws are not relevant. Note Garrett's response to this
CDA complaint: "Additionally, no one cares."