Hi there,

I've seen many hosts who offer Cogent or Multihomed bandwidth. I searched a little bit and some people say that Cogent is not quality bandwidth. I'm quite new to this kind of stuff, so I would like to what Cogent Bandwidth or Multihomed bandwidth really is.

Can somebody explain a little bit more about this subject?

Thnx!

Cogent bandwidth know as cheap bandwidth.
Higher ping, sometimes packet losses and so on.

Multi-homed means more than 1 provider - so your visitors can come via any of the providers (normally goes off location of them) - so if one line goes down, all your visitors that normally use that route to your server use a different route

I also found that Cogent is quite busy.

So... do I have to avoid hosts who offer Cogent Bandwidth? I don't want bad quality.

Not realy. Cogent bandwidth isn't as bad as people may make it sounds. Yes it does have high pings and some packets lost but for the standard user visiting the page they will not realy notice any of this. Unless your running gaming servers or something that realy requires a low ping its not realy going to affect you. As long as the bandwidth is multihomed or has a backup you should never realy have any problems.

Alot of people would say to stay well clear of Cogent as most people belive they will go bust soon enough. Thats probily true but as long as the company you host with has connections to other ISP's it shouldn't affect you. Thats why you pay more for multihomed bandwidth.

Multihoming is that a provider has multiple lines comming in their datacenter and in case one connection fails, the bandwidth is routed over the second line (also, depending from routing, bandwidth is routed over the best path), in other words REDUNDANCY. You should check out some BGP info as well.

If you have one line coming in (no matter how big pipe it is) but if a router fails, the line is cut or any other disaster -- will cut your connection and your server/web site will be down.

Alright so say I'm looking for a host or server or whatever, whats the best bandwidth to get or look out for??

well make list of potential providers, than ping and traceroute them see which one is the fastest, but prefer data center's with few bandwidht providers, verio may be good one but if its the only link when it goes down you'll cry for a cogent backup :)