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

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?

probably because they oversell their bandwidth.

also you could check traceroute to those hosts and see if it's going by a bad/obscure route

Time to move to MOJOHOST and forget these problems for a lifetime! ;)

Just took a look at Mojohost. Looks very expensive compared with everything else. I'm happy with Soft Layer.

Yep and that guy didn't answer your question.

did you try to contact support?

Your speeds will always vary in correlation with your distance from the datacenter and the type of file transfer being done.

I'm glad you like to use the speedtest at SpeakEasy :thumbsup FYI we hear the same complaints all the time regarding slow issues with webair? caro and a few others as well.

Yes, they basically said it was the connection on my end. Which I don't buy because if I can get a speed test to the same city and even geographically further ones that has dramatically better performance that would seem to eliminate that possibility.

You get what you pay for toots.

It amazes me the number of people who make comments like this. No offense toots. I am not picking on you. I see this complaint on mainstream boards all day long. Baffling.

Bandwidth and web hosting is your STORE FRONT and LIFE LINE. If you are actually in the business, you need to start treating it like a BUSINESS. People who are unwilling to pay for a solid host deserve grief.

As for webair... lol.

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

One last thing, the speed test that you ran online across the country is complete hypothetical bullshit - it's not transmitting an equivalent to media files or even doing a real download to give you that output. Someone else could probably do a better job of explaining that than I can but I've come across it when we've looked to implement a simple speed test on our site all of those scripts do the same thing which is NOT a real world result. In the real world you want to download a 100 megabyte movie file and the bits being shown in those speed tests are actually different.

Brad

See sig ...
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well i was going to say mojo host is top notch, but ill bet Brad explained that :thumbsup

:thumbsup

Thanks Deej!

Brad

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.

Your connection speed based on "speed tests" and what TW Cable tells you that your speed is, has nothing to do with how fast you can actually download or upload files.

Try downloading files from other hosts to compare instead of using a speakeasy test....even then though, that only tells you the speed from that host to you, that doesn't necessarily mean that host will have the best speed to your customers.

I get better download speeds from sites hosted on WVfiber than I do sites hosted on Level3....but which network do you think is better to be hosted on?

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. ^_^

bits and bytes
Kb vs KB :pimp

It's awesome that you are happy, that's the most important thing!

My pleasure :)

The only thing that I forgot to mention is that the FTP connection from a client to a host is especially the fault of the ISP because it really is the throughput on the inbound route, the one that the ISP totally controls.

Brad

If I ever need a dedicated server I will look you up. You took the time to write this long ass post. :thumbsup

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

hit me up on icq i will put up a test box for you for nothing, bandwidth will tell the tale

When I think of good reliable hosting only one company comes to mind and that is ISprime.:2 cents:

Was wondering how long it took before someone plugged Dreamhost here.... but like you said before... if they're stupid enough to go Dreamhost, then they deserve what's coming to them - I would completely agree... :2 cents:

you need to remove that brown stuff you have on your lip, i dont understand why you suck dream hosts cock.

What you stated is exactly right.

Also, WHO they are getting bandwidth from is important. Some providers got horrible uptime...
We get it from 6 different upstream providers now so if 1 fails, other 5 can still push the traffic. I've heard of some hosting companies getting bandwidth from 1 provider.... That'll put me through nightmares every night!!

If you are targeting foreign countries, the location of the data center is important in my opinion too. I guess not too many people care these days but having a least hop is important to your destination.

We have many Japanese clients, so we buy a LOT of bandwidth from providers that has submarine cable directly connected to Japan. The data center is right above where the submarine cable touches the land.... So, we claim our selves to be one of the fastest provider to Japan.

By the way, original poster... wanna use our test server to see if you see the speed difference? It uses CentOS

I think so!!

Cash never said that .... I did.

He praises the great storage allocation and terabandwith that goes with it ...

Educationally, this is a good, needs more people reading it. Bump for those out of the know.

Cheers,

Brad