I'd like to give a nod and a huge "Thank you!" to the Iditarod Trail Committee for one of the things they've done for their website. It looks like the site, and the Iditarod media content, are being served out of Amazon Web Services.
What this means in practice is improved performance, potentially much improved performance. Amazon Web Services are what's known as a "cloud" service, and it includes the ability to add resources (computational, disk, bandwidth) when they're needed and remove them when they're not. It makes it possible to move services around, keeping them available even in the face of hardware failure. If they do a good job, and Amazon does an excellent job, you won't notice it at all because the data will flow smoothly and services will remain available. I've been an Insider subscriber since they first started charging for it (although the last few years I haven't gotten a video subscription, but this year I have), and it seems like year after year after year after year they knew exactly how many subscribers they had and still underprovisioned their services, resulting in poor video performance, site outages, etc. This should solve that problem.
I should mention that the first few days that they started to see a lot of traffic there were some performance issues that appeared to be related to their database servers rather than their web services, and it looks like they've sorted that out. So, credit where credit is due, and many thanks to the ITC for taking these problems seriously and taking the right steps to getting them fixed.
For the price it should work very well and hasn't in the past. Good to hear of the improvements and thanks for the info.
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