Twitter builds custom data centre

Twitter will shift its technical operations infrastructure into a new custom-built data centre later this year, according to a blog post.

The post, which confirmed earlier speculation on GigaOM, said the centre would be based "in the Salt Lake City area".

It was among a number of recent measures undertaken by the micro-blogging service to improve reliability and stability of the platform.

Twitter's engineering team said that having a dedicated data centre would enable it to "have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs.

"Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers," the post read.

"Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.

"Finally, Twitter's custom data centre is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure."

The company said it would continue working with NTT America - its current host - "to operate our current footprint".

It also said there were plans "to bring additional Twitter managed data centres online over the next 24 months."