What is cogent bandwith?
 

Just been reading some threads about hosting and curious to know what cogent bandwith is... and what does it mean about 95% percentile...

I don't know much at all about bandwidth but I heard that Cogent is pretty shit bandwidth

is that your way of saying... "i don't know"?

Very cheap, unreliable bandwidth. Risk of slow loading pages, and high ping rates along with heavy packet loss...

cheap!

Cogent bandwith is something you certainly don't want to buy

cogent bandwidth stay away. you have no backup meaning if cogent goes down. you are fucked up the ass. like other providers you have a backup. cogent is very cheap tho. companis usally get cogent and sell services in bulk bandwidth. always make sure you ask what kind of bandwidth you are getting. if they tell you one thing. ask for an ip on there network. trace route the ip. which will show the backbones. you done want garbage. you cant afford downtimes.

thanks for the info... :thumbsup

I ALSO LOVE YOUR SIG!!! :1orglaugh

Cogent is the crappiest bandwidth you could possibly get.

But also very cheap !

95th Is a little complicated to calculate but it basically means uncapped connection, but you pay for your highest peak over your bandwidth commitment, minus 5%.

cheap shit

:2 cents: :1orglaugh Let me go get Brad, he loves to talk about Cogent!:1orglaugh :Graucho

Not true.
95 percentile means that every 5 minutes they do a reading from your MRTG, after a month they take all the readings (should be 8640 in total) the nthey take top 5% of them (should be 432 5 minutes periods in total) and remove them. After that you pay for what you peak was.
example you have 432 peaks during 1 month at 10 mbit, your 433th highest peak was 1 mbit. You pay for 1 mbit
example you have 433 peaks during 1 month at 10 mbit, the rest of the time your server was down or transfered only 1 kbps, you would end up paying for 10 mbit

You talking about COGENT what was 2 years ago!
Try the new cogent now and you will change your mind!

I think it's two bandwidths that are born connected to each other.
You know.. like at the head or hip.

EVERYONE TALKING SHIT ABOUT COGENT HAS 0 KNOWLEDGE OF BANDWIDTH CARRIERS



fact.

Care to get into a battle about that one?

Cogent has had all sorts of problems since they got way more customers than they could handle. Thev've since bought out several backbone providers and expanded their network.

Cogent isn't anywhere near as bad as people make them out to be.


Imagine for a moment what would happen if _you alone_ were to open a gas station in your City that served up gas for 20 cents per gallon & because of your new modern way of doing it, you could do it and turn a small profit... while your competitors are charging 10x more.


How long do you think it would take before everyone in the oil industry from the guy working on the rig, to the guy behind the gas station counter would be cursing your name and trying to sabatoge your inevitable growth.


That is a perfect analogy for what cogent did & how the market reacted.

Everyone trashed talked their name, their business plan, their network etc... because they were scared shitless.




And in fact, unless you're a hosting company, you can thank them for breaking the market down to the < $100/mbit range.

In the past (~3 years ago?) when they first started promoting their $1000 100/mbit deal in a market where the lowest pricing was ~$150/mbit (if not more) sure, they ran into a few of kinks.




Anyway I'm sure they are fine now for the money, as they always were - BUT now the market is far more competitive and you have more options for "premium" bandwidth for close to or even less than what you would pay for Cogent.

It would be a perfect analogy, if you didn't fail to mention the oil tanks blowing up frequently - and once you were almost out of oil, you just added water and continued to oversell your stock.

Reread my post, and then - note:

Egonetworks, a hosting company.




Sure... the oil wasn't the high grade premium stuff. But just like "regular" unleaded, it was still perfectly useable - in this case, for 10% (or less) of what the nearest competitor was priced at.

Note: No we are not - we provide mainstream services to call centers and cable operators. My sig however, advertises a hosting company.

BTW, You trash them on overselling... do you know of any DIRECT cogent clients who weren't able to get the amount of bandwidth they paid for? (minus network overhead of course)

I don't.


However, I know alot of providers who were DIRECT with them who oversold the shit out of that cheap bandwidth while they were undercutting any and all competitors who were NOT using cogent.

Alot of those companies made "cogent bandwidth" look bad by overselling their cheap lines.

IIRC, Cogent wasn't an option in Canada. THat means you didn't have access to the deals... so you just had to wait for the market to come down in order to compete (on price) no?

Ah well :glugglug

It would have made for a better debate. :winkwink:

Not worth the hassle

I know direct customer that once they reached about 50% capacity they started 15-20% packetloss constantly. Also, any traffic originating from overseas was just horrid.

Cogent is an option in Canada, in select cities; as is WorldCom, Verio, AT&T/Allstream, Bell/TeleGlobe, C&W, 360Networks, Yipes, NAC, Williams, etc.

Dont forget Peer1 Andrew.

Cogent is good for long haul routes, I'll admit that they arnt built for latency, but theres differant solutions for differant applications. :2 cents:

Ahhh yes, Peer1 - they're available in quite a few cities as well, but not as many as Bell/Teleglobe, Telus, Group Telecom, 360Networks, AT&T, WorldCom and Verio.

Cogent *can* be good, but it's all about what city you're in and how oversold that segment of their network is. Not to mention, it will depend if you need low latency from different areas of the world.

Err.. I said "Wasn't an option" ... I'm talking 2-3 year ago Cogent -- back when they were having growing pains due to the rest of th emarket not wanting to play nice with them. I don't think they were in Canada back then.

I have no idea what Cogent is up to these days, but if they are still here - that alone speaks volumes.

SCO's still here - that doesn't say much.

Cogent is still alive because Cisco exec were smoking crack.

Cogent isn't the best performing bandwidth, that is why you won't see any of the most successful programs in adult hosting their network on it. Their network has changed over the last couple of years and so have their finances. I believe now that they are probably here to stay.

Their peering relationships aren't great and that is why most of the time when you trace to a site on their network there will be quite a bit of latency. With regard to reliability, I believe that has probably improved over time.

Let's put everything into perspective, though. Most hosts of any good size are paying near Cogent prices for tier 1 bandwidth. Now that the playing field has been leveled, as reflected in price decreases by most all hosting companies in the last few years, in my opinion there is no reason to choose to host on Cogent.

The disparity you see in pricing between managed dedicated hosting on Cogent versus other networks is that often times the rest of us have a bigger network investment, more staffing, etc. Despite the fact that bandwidth is one of the largest costs at a hosting company, facilities, staffing, network hardware, software and so much more all contribute to the total cost of doing business. There is much more to judging a hosting provider then simply the network(s) they are on, buyer beware.

Cheers,

Brad

Well we run our boxes on Cognet through the Miami Data Vault with Epic as the backup. Incase Cognet goes down the NOC can route them through there instead.

No probs so far and our clients are happy.

Just what serious business wants to gamble their future on dollar store bandwidth?

As a paysite owner, quality and service are what matter most to me, not "what will do'.

Damn, looks like I scared some people off from posting... this is happening a lot lately. Things that make you go Hummmmmmmmmmmm.....

Cheers,

Brad