Is cogent bandwidth really that bad??
 

I'm currently in talks with a dedicated host who offers a 100mbps, guranteed 85mbps dedicated box with cogent bandwidth. I remember awhile ago people use to say that cogent was very unreliable, what are you thoughts on it now? Would you recommend hosting a paysite off of cogent bandwidth?

No I would not. I only have experience on a virtual that my host flipped to cogent but the reliability took a shit immediately. So did conversions.

try it out with us we have cogent on separate GIG connections that fail over to our fully tier one network in case cogent has issues. I'll give you super rates on both if you don't like cogent switch to tier one =)

If it's in FDC's datacenter then stay away

Cogent bandwith is not bad at all, we have been using their bandwith for 5 + years now and it has gotten much better. There is still latency issues that you dont get from the tier 1 providers, but all and all its not as bad as everyone says it is.
That being said we dont and wont use it for any of our clients mission critical websites.Especially paysites Just my :2 cents:

where is fdc's datacenter?

It is at FDC's . What is wrong with FDC's datacenter?

its ok you just gotta use it for the right stuff. not for paysites id say or you gotta fo a failover

Apparently the provider is multihomed to above.net and telia. The price is 899 for a 1gig port. Guranteed 100mbps

lololoolloloolol

why the lol?

Do a search for feedback on FDC and see how many pissed off people you find. I was in their DC with a reseller for about 2 weeks and it was nothing but problems.

Are you fucking kidding me ?

set the cogent server to a failover and its 99% solved

cogent is infinitely better than they were 3 years ago. like many business who have reinvented themselves, they suffer the burdon of carrying around a bad outdated reputation.

does cogent compete with level3 or the likes of other premier bandwidth providers, of course not. You still pay for what you get, but you can successfully run a site on cogent these days and not see a major adverse affect from it, imo.

there are a ton of other low end bandwidth solutions like yipes and williams that are equal to cogent that just don't have the stigma that comes with the cogent name, but provide similar quality. So really you just have to ask yourself what do you want to pay, because at each price point, you're going to end up with a similar bandwidth solution.

I use cogent now... used verio before and had alot of problems with connectivity. Cogent works great for me.

What I saw is that the network is much more stable now than it was like a year ago....I would say; just try it and you will know.

900 bucks for 100Mbit continuous sounds *awfully* cheap.

I would ask to see live stats on the status of their network before you buy... the only way I can see this would be profitable for them is if they're running at 80 or 90% of their total capacity, which means that when they have unusual traffic flows, their network will max out... which means slow or no connectivity for your server during that period.

The ISPs we've been with that have good reliability never use more than 60% of their total capacity at any given time, and provide a blend of bandwidth from a number of providers. Don't know if that's standard with better providers, but we've found it works best for us...

Look at it this way... if good bandwidth costs $3000 and too-good-to-be-true bandwidth costs $800, you only need to make 4 sales a day at $25/sale to pay the difference between good and shitty bandwidth, and if you have slow connectivity for a couple hours a day, and a decent traffic stream and conversions, you'll almost certainly lose more than 4 sales during that time.

Of course, you may be able to find a better deal for good bandwidth at considerably less than $3000... I'm just giving an example.

I have a early business meeting, so I will try to be short, the ONLY thing FDC has going for it, is its location. Being in the same building as the Chicago Options Clearing Corporation means you will never have a power outage, but if you want a real eyeopener, ask for a quick tour!

I went in there a few years back with my lead geek and one of our security guys, the place reminded us of the good old days of ghetto datacenters, these guys had no clue about service level agreements, temperture management, security, DNS, denial of service attacks, you name it!

They're also a bunch of narcs too. There was one local guy that sent in a white box with like 5 hard drives, it was of their opinion that the guy had to be running a warez server and called the FBI. Nevermind if he was running a raid network for keeping his shit backed up since I have seen college dorm networks run better than this place. :Oh crap

If you have your heart set on hosting there, buy a whitebox server from CompUSA and host it at FDC for a month, make sure there is nothing mission critical on it, because you are going to want to pull that box pretty fucking quickly, its only because you have the owners promising that things will be better next month that they stay in business, or getting a bunch of clients that don't know better (or are aware of the five nines) and think this is the tits on the boar for what they are getting.

But fuck, don't take a local's word for it, host away!

Problems with connectivity at Verio?

There's nothing wrong with Cogent in 2006. Depending on where the request comes from it can be faster serving than Verio or any other provider

Back in 2002 sure it had problems, but now the only thing to watch out for is peering conflicts like the one that happened 6 or 7 months ago.

With a failsafe setup like Webair it makes no sense to not use Cogent for most things except tours and payment pages.