Hello,

We are about to get a second dedicated server. The hosting company says that their bandwidth is Cogent Only! They also said that Cogent is a very big company when it comes to Bandwidth, but the question is how reliable is Cogent? The bandwidth price is extremely great but I wonder if this means bad service?

Thank you
Eisa

Cogent is ok for hosting, but depending on your reliability needs you should find a host with a few providers. Depending on how it's set-up it can not only increase availability but network speeds. (Some hosts will have Cogent and a "backup" provider and only allow routing through Cogent. While this does help for availability it does nothing for network performance)

Hope that helps!

Thanks for replying Mike,

I wonder if anyone knows anything about Cogent's reliability. Do they have +99% up time or are they one of those companies that are up only at night?

Thank you

Originally posted by Q8man
Thanks for replying Mike,

I wonder if anyone knows anything about Cogent's reliability. Do they have +99% up time or are they one of those companies that are up only at night?

From the site they state 99.99% availability...

READ MORE: http://cogentco.com/Difference/quality_service.html

;)

wget www.verifast.net/uumap.tar.Z


You can speed test this. It's Cogent only and great uptime.

Citrus thanks for replying,

Yeah I know I read that. But these days I don't know if we should believe what companies say about themselves :eek:
I wanted to hear from a person who has actually tried a Cogent only service and whether they like it or not :)

Thanks

Their uptime seems to be decent, but their routing gets really bad and causes lots of slow downs (very noticable slow downs) quite frequently.

I was recently informed (by my Cogent rep mind you, but he has no reason to lie to me) that Cogent is now the third largest carrier in North America.

The definition of "largest" could be bandwidth capacity, backbone size, or anything almost (didn't really bother to get tons of details), just thought i'd share that as i just learned it :).

Oh yes, and cogent uptime, it's been over 99.9% for us. Typically cogent has 1-5 minute downtime (schedueled) per month to do maintenance, they like to keep a window monthly so if they do need to do stuff, they can, but they don't always use it.

Latency can be a pain sometimes (compared to huge expensive providers like uunet), but aside from a bad route to the uk the other week, it's never been a problem.

Hope that helps :)

Ohh yeah porcupine your responce was very helpful. Thanks to all of you :)

np :)

I wouldn't put a server in a provider who don't offer any kind BW backup, it doesn't matter if its cogent or uunet.

Originally posted by Jedito
I wouldn't put a server in a provider who don't offer any kind BW backup, it doesn't matter if its cogent or uunet.

:agree:

and it should be BGP routed, because if one provider went down for any reason, for example garbage collector hitting your data center :D you will have to face lots of downtime enough to get you out of hosting business.

bgp routed is all fine and dandy, a lot of places cant do it though (like people in a sprint data center), and it's not financially feasable for many others.

bgp routed is all fine and dandy, a lot of places cant do it though (like people in a sprint data center), and it's not financially feasable for many others.Not having a backup provider is asking for MAJOR trouble. All circuts go down for extended periods every now and again.

Originally posted by RackMy.com
Not having a backup provider is asking for MAJOR trouble. All circuts go down for extended periods every now and again.

Not necessarilly,

Theres a lot of data centers aroudn the world that only have connectivity from a certain provider in them, like sprint data centers, etc where you can't really get another provider routed in. I'm sure the majority of them have quite a few clients (wont say sucessfull nowdays, it's a crap game out there for most of them).

We had a box in VDI at the time when they just had Level3 in - Level3 aren't a bad provider by any means, but they had a couple of 3 hour outages (Level3 that is) within 2 weeks of each other (electical failures of some sort). Lets just say we will never go in a single homed datacenter again...

I think there would be a difference in being in a backbone's datacenter. ( Sprint, Level3, Verio, UUnet etc ) than in a datacenter that has a connection (t3, oc3 etc) to a provider.

Theres a lot of data centers aroudn the world that only have connectivity from a certain provider in them, like sprint data centers, etc where you can't really get another provider routed in. Actually, in most "providers" datacenters there is in fact more than one provider as peering takes place with others. For example, in STL there is a Savvis datacenter. Of course they have Savvis as the main provider but they also run BGP sessions with other providers (not only for peering but also in the even that Savvis goes out there is other redunancy). Sprint and most others are the same.

Again, in my opinion having one provider is very dangerous.