Well for a long time I've been reading about different types of bandwidth for dedicated servers, ie, Cogent.

And to this point, I have no clue what it means, what types there are, how it works, or any of that. Can someone please explain this to me? If this is the wrong forum, I apologize in advance.

moved to dedicated hosting forum, maybe the right forum ?? i dunno, hehe

Yeah I realized that after I posted it in the wrong forum. I'm getting lost in the forums here...A sign that I need to get out more, maybe?

There are no different types, just different suppliers. The only thing that seperates Cogent from most other carriers is that it's alot less expensive then most others. That's why most of those cheap DS hosts only offer cogent.
Does that mean that it is bandwidth of lower quality ? Not really.

Off course it is always safer to host with someone who offers multiple carriers, in that case, if one should go down, the other can take over.

I don't know if description of the differences between cogent and other bandwidth is entirely true.

Cogent basically created a huge ring aroung the country and peers with different networks in different parts of it. So for example if your traffic originated in dallas from a user on the roadrunner network, and was going to your server in michigan, your packet may travel from dallas to LA where roadrunner and cogent connect, then over cogent through hops at all the major cities on the way to detroit. (I should add that I have no idea where roadrunner and cogent peer, if they even do. This is all hypothetical)

Now with non-cogent bandwidth, BGP would determine the most efficient route between the two points, resulting in less hops and lower latency.

What does this all mean to you? If latency isn't an issue, ie not doing gaming, or streaming, then cogent will work fine and save you a bundle.

Bandwidth:

Cogent bandwidth is not high quality. It is also cheaper. ($) Cogent would be considered the least reliable and probably the worst bandwidth you can get... although it is cheap... ;-)

Is Cogent actually measurably worse than any other provider though? It's all very well slagging it off for being cheap, but I'd like to see some evidence in terms of traces, packet loss etc. :)

If someone has a couple IP addresses I would love to monitor it for 30 days and see what things look like. I will be happy to share a weekly report of my findings. Cogent is a common questions that comes up for me and I have honestly not had any hands on experiance with it to say good or bad.

Maybe we could get a couple differant people moitoring the same connection and see what kind of information we can actually share with the rest of the world.