wtf is the deal with congent?
 

I am looking for a good host (why can i feel the hosting companies gathering now?) but I keep seeing 'congent' being tagged on some of them and a bunch of shit talking about it. So how do you tell who uses congent and is it really that bad?

I found a host I like, but was told they use congent - but they said if I wanted to use a different server or whatever I could use thier back-up. But if they have something other than congent why would they be using that as their backup??

I am not looking for a host with like huge limits - just need something small for now.

who is congent ?

likedown.com is the best

honestly - and this might not be the smartest thing to say as we only sell verio at racksale.com - then Cogent is fine for 99% of all business cases.

Cogent has got a really bad rep with many webmasters, its like most just love talking bad about them.
We have 3 servers on cogent that we use for backup, special clients and other stuff, and they have been just as good (uptime, stability, speed etc) for us as our verio servers are.

It does depend on where you are situated though. Take a look at those maps:

VERIO:
http://www.racksale.com/xbiz/networkmapWORLD.jpg


COGENTCO:
http://www.racksale.com/xbiz/map_opt.jpg

As you can see verio looks a bit better...but it really is margins, and cogent are getting better and better daily...

A good way to test your network speed, and the flavour of bw used is to go here:

http://www.visualware.com/visualroute/livedemo.html

From that site you can trace your server from many different locations.

The best thing i can say about cogent is that they have been behind the whole revolution-like situation that the bw-pricing has been through the last years, without them hosting would be so much more expensive for all of us, no matter who our providers are.

best regards,

Ditlev
racksale.com
19678140

foolio,

Hit me up, i'll hook you up :)

Take a look at ISPrime. We have connectivity with Verio, HE which seem to be the popular networks on this board, along with connectins to other carriers. Contact me on icq if you want to chat or have any questions.

You should dig into Choopa - http://www.choopa.com I've been using them for just over a year now and I've been VERY happy with them.

They have a nice deal going on right now, check it out -

P4 1.7ghz
512mb
40gb
3000 gigs
ONLY $500 a month !

The very sweet thing about it is that they DON'T use Cogent OR Verio, they use the best bandwidth, ONLY Tier 1 quality stuff.

Check out this capacity -
6 x 1000mbps with C&W
1 x 1000mbps with Internap
1 x 1000mbps with WilTel
1 x 1000mbps with Net Access

AND their bandwidth utilization here - http://www.choopa.com/netutil.phtml

I don't think that there's many hosts out there that have the kind of transit capacity that Choopa has AND it's all HIGH QUALITY STUFF.

Plus the prices, you just can't beat them :)

It took me a long time to pick a host and when I eventually picked one I went with a cogent provider.

Recently, they switched to Global Crossing (a premium provider).

Cogent was PERFECT for my uses. I had some latency from time to time as cogent has peering points that get saturated (goddamn their point in san francisco) but it was good otherwise. That small issue was the only thing I had to bitch about, so that's good :).

Now that I'm on global crossing I dropped 12 hops to my server and my ping time is around 12ms. (that's really fast). Cogent is a realiable network and is good for tgp'ing in my opinion. If your going to go with a paid site, don't foodstamp on your bandwidth. Go for the better juice.

In all reality, bandwidth prices have gotten so low I don't know why you would start with cogent anymore. Eventually you will want to switch to a premium provider and god knows transferring sites/servers sux the big c@ck.

to recap: cogent routing sux ballz, that's why they are cheap. there are no issues of reliability.