Why does bandwidth to so many hosting companies suck so much?

well i was going to say mojo host is top notch, but ill bet Brad explained that

The only hosting companies that I can max out my bandwidth to are The Planet / Host Gator and Soft Layer.

I've gone through Reliable Hosting, Webair, and Caro and got rid of them shortly after because I could only download and upload to them at a small fraction of my bandwidth.

I'm uploading to Webair right now for a client and it's only going at a measly 50 KB/s. I can upload at slightly over 200 KB/s with my connection to Soft Layer and The Planet.

What gives?

I have Time Warner Cable (business class cable) in Chatsworth. 15 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up. Speakeasy speed tests all the way to the East Coast get me around 12 Mbps down and 1.2 Mbps up and yet why can't I transfer to/from these hosting companies at even close to that?

When I had a 56K modem my connection would be 56K-115K according to "whatever", but the best download speed I ever got on a file was 5K.

i use softlayer, best move i made, im curently at 30mbps with them

Brad,
As a general manager of ISP, I thank you for your reply that you have made above. ^_^

Brandon,

The answer to your question is perhaps more complicated than you are really interested in hearing. You have the misunderstanding that your business class connection itself has dedicated bandwidth for your use and guaranteed delivery at all times of the day at the same throughput. The reality of your connection is that it is oversubscribed greatly at your first local hop out (the street corner or Central Office) and that your traffic in large part travel's Time Warner's network as far as Time Warner finds it convenient to take you. They have no concern for congestion or best route, their goal is to take you as short a distance on their network as possible and then pass you off to a peering partner (either the end host or a global network that the host of the content purchases connectivity from but always least cost routing).

Although we can do little to control the path which people "trace" or come into MojoHost we do have complete control over how traffic leaves our network. FYI, your trace to other locations is of little or no value for several reasons: First, that packet type is the lowest priorty so routers along the way often wait to respond often giving an inaccurate impression or latency. Second, even a seemingly text book trace does not give any indication of actual throughput - yes, you could be 20ms away but you could be downloading at 200k or 2000k just as easily.

We deploy an excellent network configuration that focuses on making sure that no network connections at the edge or within our network are ever saturated or performance degraded. We deploy extra technology at the edge of our network from Internap call the Flow Control Platform (10G Model) which does constant round-trip analysis to search out packet loss, bad routes and excessive latency across all 7 carriers that we connect to so that on autopilot we are always picking a sane route out of our network.

Lastly, other factors can affect your upload and download performance quite easily... the actual state of the server you are on - if the server is running out of RAM and swapping to hard disk, if the hard disk has a wait, if the CPU has a load on it - even your FTP or local network settings.

Broadband companies have done an excellent job of marketing their products inaccurately to the extent that consumers typically have no idea what they've purchased. Your 15/2 plan isn't for guaranteed service anywhere in the continental US - check with them, they won't guarantee any level of throughput or routing. It's easy to understand your frustration with hosting companies because just like the internet providers their setups are often complicated and sometimes can be misleading.

Remember though, even with your examples of Webair and Caro by comparison to SoftLayer and The Planet or Hostgator you're not really being scientific about any of your results. And from an outsider perspective and even as a competitor I'd be more likely to believe that you received better performance from Webair and Caro any day of the week. They're motivated to move the bits and bytes - they're not selling $150/month hosting packages that are predicated on oversubscription with a 2000gb/mo bandwidth limits that are never reached by mainstream customers.

Lastly, don't write off my company as being "too expensive". Yes, we are not the cheapest in town. We haven't spoken (to my knowledge) and as there aren't really any prices listed on my web site and only every once in a while do I run a special I can't really think that you actually know what our prices are. There is no comparison to the service we provide versus SoftLayer, Hostgator or The Planet. By all measures when you quote out with them what I define as MojoHost fully managed service their pricing will far exceed ours and I wish you luck if you ever had to compare the deliverables on that. If you're just looking for a server with a control panel and root to manage yourself then I'm not your guy until or unless you're moving large bandwidth - because there I also kick their asses. See, all those $150-$250/mo plans that include 2000gb have overage at upwards of .50/gb which is > $100 per megabit which truly blows.

Call any of those companies and tell them you want a fully managed server with 50 megabit fully burstable on a gigabit port including unlimited tech support, move assistance, security, script installation, full monthly backup...

I hope this was helpful. If you want to talk networks more don't hesitate to call me anytime during the business day!

Cheers,

Brad

See sig ...
067093915318
168757689476
216263692101
408636009193
846090586647

See sig ...
067093915318
168757689476
216263692101
408636009193
846090586647

bandwidth is getting cheaper; thus, you get what you pay for!

probably because they oversell their bandwidth.