[SweetT]

Maybe I can help a bit.....

Cogent has built a network designed to offer a low cost solution to companies that need bandwidth. They purchased a couple of providers early on to gain peering arrangements and transit arrangements so that they could provide connectivity to the world. Just remember their number one priority is cost.

With that said, however, the Cogent network has been pretty stable over the past couple of years. Very few outages. But using their system of "hot potato" routing, it is most cost effective to get your traffic off of their network as soon as possible, even if the carrier that they are handing it off to is not the best route available. In addition, their peering relationships are usually always strained. How many people remember when AOL pulled their peering from Cogent back about 6-8 months ago? There was a 3 day window when Cogent could not get *any* traffic to AOL and another 6 weeks where it was overloading thier Level3 peering point to an extreme and made it excruciatingly slow.....but the network never went down.

So....to sum it up....if you are looking for high quality, fast, and low latency hosting (ie paysites, reseller sites) I would stay away from Cogent. If the quality is not that important to you (ie Free Hosting, spam) then Cogent will probably do you just fine.

Hope this helps!


--T