Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : What does Non-Cogent mean?

[dooku]

Hello,

I noticed at some dedicated server companies that they state "Non-Cogent" behind their bandwidth spec of the server?

What does this mean exactly?

Regards
Dooku

[NetHosted-Andrew]

Cogent bandwidth was/still is considered to be 2nd rate so it's a positive thing in most peoples eyes that a server provider doesn't use Cogent bandwidth.

Andrew

[Ran]

Originally posted by dooku
Hello,

I noticed at some dedicated server companies that they state "Non-Cogent" behind their bandwidth spec of the server?

What does this mean exactly?

Regards
Dooku

Personally I don't think they're that bad anymore, so don't fall into the marketing hole. They've drastically improved in many areas but in some locations their routes are still a lil messy.

[amusive.com]

It's a marketing ploy that means nothing. It says nothing about their network mix or their redundancy. I'd rather have a mix with cogent then a company that has one or two peers.

Cogent's second rate image is from providers who tend to use ONLY cogent and push it until the line is saturated. Well, duh, it's going to be crappy then.

Personally from one of the locations I work at USING cogent (connecting to ev1servers, which uses it, versus sm which does not) saves me roughly 20 ms in my ping time.

[music]

While Cogent is not the best they have gotten much better.
You always have to take everything with a little skepticism.

Cogent is Cheap and many high priced places want you to believe that CHEAP Bandwidth like Cogent is no good, the phrase is a marketing tool.

I think it is over blown and Cogent is great in any BGP mix and for most of the internet users it is probably just fine for the vast majority of WHT

[SMachiz]

Cogent is very undeserving in their reputation. They're much better than a good deal of other networks. I would take Cogent bandwidth over HE any day of the week. Like amusive said, it was fly-by-night hosts that would overload their Cogent lines that largely gave rise to Cogent as an inferior network.

Sam

[dooku]

Ok, thanks for all the replies explaining this so I don't need to panic when seeing cogent as one of the network connections :-)

Regards
Dooku

[layer0]

Non-Cogent just means that the provider does not use Cogent as one of their bandwidth providers. However, Cogent has improved a lot and I would actually recommend it if you are looking for cost effective bandwidth. MIT (a university) has 6 giges of Cogent bandwidth and when I was at that university the network was excellent.

[IRCCo Jeff]

Cogent bandwidth is perfectly acceptable for many, if not most purposes. The "concern" roots back to several years back when they lost their ATDN peering and it caused some network saturation issues which no longer exist.

[nogi]

Cogent has improved a lot

Hmm, well, glad to hear that.

John

[cheyenne1212]

I have a boxes with TP on their premium network, and I also have a SM unmetered box on their cogent only network. The difference in ping between premium netwrok and cogent network is only 10ms. Not really a whole lot of difference, and I can still max out my DSL and 10Mbit connections on other servers when downloading from my unmetered box on the cogent network.

[Verae]

Cogent is not that bad , however you would never want to be on a cogent only network.

[SolidJoe]

Originally posted by dooku
Hello,

I noticed at some dedicated server companies that they state "Non-Cogent" behind their bandwidth spec of the server?

What does this mean exactly?

Regards
Dooku

It means that the company is being silly. Most people who bash Cogent have never even used it. They see other people saying what an unstable network it is, then join in the fun! Or if they have used it, it's with a provider who saturates the lines so much it wouldn't matter who provided the transit it would be unstable.

[TechMicheal]

I have been on Cogent bandwidth. The company had two other peers as I recall. And no, the provider did not saturate the line, as far as we could see anyway.

Part of the problem with Cogent is that a few years ago they owed Cisco a very sizable sum of money. They then started to become unstable for various reasons. When I was on Cogent a couple of years ago, it was extremely unreliable. I don't doubt what others have said with regards to Cogent improving, but the financial problems and the lack of reliability in Cogent's past is what makes providers say "no Cogent!" in their marketing schemes. Can't say I blame them really. No doubt quite a few webhosts got burned with Cogent's past problems.

[jsw6]

If you had problems with a vendor who used Cogent in their BGP mix, then the vendor was just too stupid (or cheap) to use Cogent for what works well. They have a reliable, low-cost network; and yes, their peering is spotty in some regions to certain destination ASes.

As a BGP-speaking network, your vendor should have realized this and steered traffic away from Cogent when Cogent's path to a given destination AS was unsatisfactory. Failure to do so is your vendor's fault, not Cogent's.

I'll give you another example. I moved some of a client's traffic bound for AT&T onto a Level(3) circuit in Chicago recently. Level(3)'s circuits to AT&T in Chicago are badly saturated, and I found it to be an unsatisfactory path. I moved the traffic back to another provider, and de-preferenced those routes from Level(3) so they'd be less likely to be used in the event of an outage of other transit circuits. This is how knowledgable people operate quality hosting networks. According to your story, your vendor did not do this, and their customers suffered as a result.

Cogent isn't the only large transit AS that has peering problems to specific networks. With the right selection of transit providers and a knowledgable network operations staff you can make just about anything perform if you are willing to spend more money to send some traffic out more expensive transit circuits. On the other hand, if you are either too cheap or not knowledgable enough to do that, you'll have problems with any economy transit provider, and indeed, with many more reputable and expensive transit vendors.