GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Looking for internap hosts

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but internap is all smoke and mirrors.

There is plenty of marketing bullshit involved in hosting companies, bandwidth resellers, transit companies, etc ...

Eg: For example, many hosts advertise here to have "three providers" and are "fully multihomed", but if you actually check, they don't have an AS number (required to be multihomed), and are singlehomed to one provider (a common one I've seen on gfy is abovenet). It's also common for plenty of companies to advertise that they are "Tier1", when in fact they aren't - eg Cogentco has a large network and lots of peers, but the definition of Tier1 is that you do not buy transit or paid peering from any other network, and every route on the internet is either a customer, or a peer. Internap likes to market that they are "Tier0" because they connect to a bunch of Tier1's. Smoke and mirrors, no such thing as "Tier0".

Now, getting to the technical part of why internap sucks ... Internap connects to a lot of transits, in many areas they have UUnet, Level3, Sprint, ATT, Verio - maybe even more. To a layperson this may sound like it's great, it's not. Firstly, because they have so many links, the size of the links are all smaller. It's not uncommon for them to have a pop that is homed off of a bunch of ds3's (45mbits) and oc3's (155mbits). Sure, their aggregate may be 2000mbits (which isn't too impressive nowadays anyway), but if you want to transfer some content from a fast source at 100mbits, you may be saturating one of their T3's or one of their OC3's (say it normally has 80 mbits of traffic, and 75mbits of headroom). Secondly, when you announce a route using BGP using internap, they announce it to all of their transit's, each transit then announces it to all of their customers/peers. When this happens, each router on the internet sees something like "this route has a best path through verio, take that" "now there's a better path through att, take that" "now there's a better route through level3, take that" etc... every time a change like that is made, that's called a "flap". If you flap more than a few times in a short period of time, you get "dampened", and part of the internet can't reach you for about 30 minutes (as an automatic penalty for wasting their router's cpu resources). Normally, it would take something like, rebooting your routers a few times to cause this, but when you're homed off of internap, just *announcing* your routes, once, is often enough to cause this. Some people may get this far and say "well fine, but it still gets better routes', well, no it doesn't. Internap takes cost into account as well, and, for example - I'm not sure who their cheapest transit is now, but it was Verio a couple of years ago, amazingly, verio often seemed to have the best route! If that wasn't enough, their staff makes amazingly poor technical decisions all the time. Eg, after 9/11, they lost power at one of their downtown nyc facilities. When it came back up, they still were "down" for multiple hours, as they were fscking (checking the filesystem) their unix boxes that run "assimilator" (their "bgp optimizer"), because they preferred giving no routes to giving "suboptimal" routes. Would you prefer to be down, or on "non-optimal" routes?

It's possible for a good webhost to manipulate their routes with a much smaller number of providers (say, two transit's and a bunch of peers, or three transit's) and achieve the same, or better, level of "optimization".

Me personally, I'd say the fact that a host uses internap generally says something about their clue levels, and that would be an alarming indicator to stay away.