Olaf Alders

MetaCPAN would not exist as we know it, if it weren't for our sponsors. I'm particularly happy to say that we have some incredibly supportive hosting sponsors who understand our needs and provide us with the gear that helps us keep up with our demand.

Our latest hosting sponsor is Liquid Web, a Managed Hosting provider with wholly-owned data centres located throughout the US (soon expanding to Europe). Liquid Web provides MetaCPAN with 3 dedicated servers, hosted in their North American facilities. Our requirements include powerful machines that enable us to query the amount of data that exists in the CPAN. With such requirements, we make significant demands of our hosting sponsors. I'm happy to say that once we partnered with Liquid Web, they proved to be immediately responsive to our needs. Having machines in multiple data centres means that MetaCPAN now has more redundancy in addition to the resources we now have access to. The Liquid Web servers are currently being used to host an Elasticsearch cluster. They are part of our Elasticsearch upgrade strategy and we'll be putting quite a load on them this week at the QA Hackathon as we work toward upgrading MetaCPAN to the latest version of Elasticsearch.

In the long term, these servers will be part of a strategy for redundancy and failover between the machines and our UK data centre. As more people come to rely on MetaCPAN, redundancy becomes more of an issue. There's an incredible amount of work involved with keeping MetaCPAN up and running. Having supportive hosting sponsors means we don't need to worry about hardware and we can focus on uptime, bug fixes, new features etc.

If you'd like to thank Liquid Web for sponsoring MetaCPAN, please take a moment to email them or ping @liquidweb on Twitter. :)

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In its 17th year of service, Liquid Web is a Managed Web Hosting and Cloud Computing company with data centers located in both Michigan and Arizona. Widely recognized for 24/7/365 on-site Heroic Support® as well its innovation in the field of Web Hosting, Liquid Web has been the subject of kudos from a number of high profile publications, such as GigaOM and ZDNet, as well as being recognized by INC Magazine as one of the United States' Fastest Growing companies for 8 consecutive years and running.

Having developed much of its software using Perl, Liquid Web remains an ardent supporter having donated significantly to Perl 5's Core Maintenance Fund (Perl 5 CMF). The company continues to use Perl as integral tool for the continued development of existing systems, such as billing, support and monitoring programs. Always looking for bright talent to add to add to its growing team -- and eying continued expansion to new locations -- Liquid Web offers a unique and supportive work environment, comprehensive benefit packages, competitive salaries, a full calendar of employee outings and incentives, as well as many opportunities for professional growth.