Better Connectivity
Great support and great features will get you nowhere without
a wide pipe. We used to advertise an OC3; now we've gone one better.
The 123 Cheap Hosting Network Operations Center in Baltimore, Maryland is
"OnNet" with Frontier Global Center (FGC), which means that we
have a direct fiber optic connection between our Cisco 7200 router
and theirs. Being OnNet with a Tier-1 provider means that we don't
link to a backbone, we are actually on a backbone. We have no
phone circuit, and don't use a Telecom link to get to the Internet;
instead, we have an in-house connection directly to FGC's ATM
fiber node, located a few floors below our servers in the same
building. This fiber optic line can handle the bandwidth of a
T3 or an OC3, and with FGC's Dense Wave Division Multiplexing
(DWDM) technology, it can handle several times the bandwidth of
an OC3.
Multiple Backbones
We share the digital distribution architecture of FGC, which is
comprised of more than 25 high-speed private peering connections
to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, AT&T, AOL,
Best, Erols, and others. FGC also has high-speed links to 8 public
exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS. To
use an analogy, the private peering connections allow data to
travel from New York to LA on a non-stop flight, while the public
exchanges enable data to fly into the Roseburg, Oregon airport.
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"Sometimes the Net is slow.... "
What happens when your pipe is hooked up to a faucet that just
trickles? Sometimes even though your ISP and your web host are
both functioning properly, you may still have a slow data transfer
rate. The Internet sends information all over the country and
the world, through a dozen or more computers on its way to you
-- and something's always getting serviced somewhere in that long
chain.
Here's what we've done to speed things up:
Route Optimization
 We have a large investment in BGP (Border Gate Protocol) technology,
which allows the traffic to your site to travel more efficiently
by finding the best route for data to travel. On a typical server
the traffic always takes the same route from client to server.
For them, if there is a bad node, traffic does not get through
at all. Because we use BGP protocol, different and more efficient
routes are taken between client and server depending on traffic
loads and broken nodes. This means our servers automatically look
for the fastest route available.
Low Latency/High Throughput
Often providers operate their networks at three to four times
responsible capacity, and as a result the corresponding transfer
times reach over 300ms for each hop along the net. The 123 Cheap Hosting
network daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak
spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity. Our transfer times range
from 15 to 80ms routinely.
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