honestly - and this might not be the smartest thing to say as we only sell verio at racksale.com - then Cogent is fine for 99% of all business cases.
Cogent has got a really bad rep with many webmasters, its like most just love talking bad about them.
We have 3 servers on cogent that we use for backup, special clients and other stuff, and they have been just as good (uptime, stability, speed etc) for us as our verio servers are.
It does depend on where you are situated though. Take a look at those maps:
VERIO:
COGENTCO:
As you can see verio looks a bit better...but it really is margins, and cogent are getting better and better daily...
A good way to test your network speed, and the flavour of bw used is to go here:
http://www.visualware.com/visualroute/livedemo.html
From that site you can trace your server from many different locations.
The best thing i can say about cogent is that they have been behind the whole revolution-like situation that the bw-pricing has been through the last years, without them hosting would be so much more expensive for all of us, no matter who our providers are.
best regards,
Ditlev
racksale.com
19678140