Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Level 3 Opinions as the Solo Colocation Facility?

[elik]

Greetings,

Since lot of people talked that Level 3 is excellent for backbone connectivity, what about using their Level 3 facilities for putting the servers in? Is it excellent course to do even that means relying on Level 3 backbone and their extensive peering for the colocation and dedicated servers?

Your input and opinions helps. Thanks.

[snickn]

I'd recommend going with a blended transit provider who has Level3 bandwidth.

Or else find a carrier neutral facility and get level3

[mgphoto]

We operate out of 2 ISPs. One is a carrier neutral facility with 40 providers. We use Level3 for part of our bandwidth mix there.

Here are my observations after 1 1/2 years:
1. 85% of the time Level3 has the fastest routing paths.
2. 90% of the time they have the lowest or close to the lowest latency.
3. We have experienced less than 45 minutes total down time from the Level3 network in the last 1 1/2 years.

While I believe you need to have multiple providers to be a quality host, if I were going to choose one it would be Level3.

[fastdatasvr]

I know what you mean. We were shopping and got a few good quotes on Level 3 only b/w but decided that even though they had a great network, we wanted backup. We decided to go with a BGP solution with Level3 primary and uunet (soon another) as backup in case of problems. You should never put all eggs in one basket because if something goes wrong (knock on fiber) you will be glad to have the backup.

[Mfjp]

What are the prices on L3 now? last time i asked them for a direct quote, the prices were bizzare.

[KDAWebServices]

Level3 tend not to deal direct unless you want a larger volume, they'll probably point you in the direction of one of their large resellers for anything below 40Mbit, or at least they do over here.

[robinbalen]

We use L3 as part of our mix here and it's excellent. The only downtime I can remember has been for the the Cisco IOS bug, and that's it. Very highly recommended indeed.

One bit of wierdness was their peering with Pipex went via Germany or something for a while - not sure if that's been resolved or not.