Pipe Just Got Better - US Recording Region Now Available

Octavian -

A new US region for recording videos is now available in all Pipe accounts. Until now only the EU region was available.

This new region, just like the existing EU region, hosts 3 servers:

  1. a server handling recording from mobile devices and the desktop HTML5 client
  2. a server handling video recording from the legacy desktop Flash client
  3. a server handling video transcoding for both servers above

When hosting is done by us, audio and video files recorded through the US region will be hosted on a new S3 bucket in the US s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com.

Choosing between regions

To direct your users to the US or EU recording servers we’ve added a new region option at the environment level.

You are thus not forced to use a single region. On the same account, you’ll be able to set up different environments for different regions on the globe. We’ve also considered adding such an option at the embed code level but we were not so excited about clients having to update their embed code to use the new region.

Each environment in your Pipe account can now toggle between:

  • EU: force all users to record using the EU region (Amsterdam for processing + Frankfurt for S3 storage)
  • US: force all users to record using the US region (N. California)
  • Auto-detect: let Pipe decide the best region between US and EU to use based on the user’s IPv4 IP.

Existing accounts and their environments will default to the EU region. New environments will default to the Auto-detect setting.

To change the region on one of your environments:

  1. Sign in at https://addpipe.com/signin
  2. Edit the desired environment
  3. Select the desired region in the new drop down
  4. Scroll down and click the [Save environment] button

Why this new region is important

Having these servers in the US will ensure much faster connections and uploads for users in the US, Canada, and South America. We’ve chosen the west side of US to ensure these benefits also extend to users in Australia and Japan.

Our new US servers will also help US companies with compliance with local data privacy laws.

Placing these recording servers in the US works hand in hand with the delivery of our video recording clients through the Amazon CloudFront CDN which ensures fast load times across the globe.

We now have all the infrastructure in place to quickly deploy other regions. We’re considering Canada, Asia, and Oceania.