Peering vs Routing - what's this confusion about?

There's a bit of confusion and misleading going around in regards network peering and routing, in lay man's terms.

Some people in authority position are giving misleading information to get to through to the average seedbox user. These people are defining peering as it were routing - well, guess what? It's NOT! And now we get people asking "how's your peering?" when they actually mean how their data will be routed for. Peering is an agreement between 2 parties to connect to each other and share traffic, in approximately 1:1 ratio usually.

Let's look at the Wikipedia definitions!
Peering synopsis as follows:

In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free, "bill-and-keep," or "sender keeps all," meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.

Routing synopsis:

Routing is the process of selecting best paths in a network. In the past, the term routing was also used to mean forwarding network traffic among networks. However this latter function is much better described as simply forwarding. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network (circuit switching), electronic data networks (such as the Internet), and transportation networks. This article is concerned primarily with routing in electronic data networks using packet switching technology.

When people give advice and discuss about this, they get the two confused, even the self-claimed professional and authority figures who might even be in the hosting or networking business!

So in short:
Peering is an agreement between 2 networks to send directly to each other traffic without compensation and thus avoiding transit costs and making the latency lower between the two networks and hence increasing networking quality. These 2 networks need to be geographically meeting in the same location.

Routing is how the packets move in the internet, through which networks a packet routes through to get to the end recipient, finding the shortest and fastest path between these two networks.

Cogent, Verizon, Comcast. Get your act together - NOW!

Cogent, Verizon and Comcast - Get your damn act together now for the sake of users!

Cogent is a brilliant disruptive force in the networking industry - they aim to have the best pricing around, and aim constantly to make better offers for their customers, hence their network has grown really fast.

Verizon and Comcast are the big bad telcos in the states who want to control everything. They all have a peering agreement between each other.

Thing is, Cogent has a lot of customers who use tons of bandwidth as their Mbps rates are generally the lowest. In today's market as low as around 0,45€/Mbps! (4500€ for 10Gig link)

Hence, Cogent is the choice for parties who move a lot of data, such as Netflix.

Verizon and Comcast are telcos, they have their network extending for the last mile and they too have vast backbone networks to connect all the metropolitan areas together, all the counties and states.

Cogent doesn't offer connections to the end user, they focus on datacenters, backbone networking, connecting different datacenters, networks and telcos together.

For more than a year Verizon and Comcast has been refusing to upgrade the peering with Cogent because they are such a disruptive force and moves so much traffic, Cogent gets the big data customers which Verizon and Comcast are unable to reach.
Verizon and Comcast have the eyeballs, Cogent have the providers, until lately Cogent has been starting to get the eyeballs as well from other countries smaller telcos getting their transit agreement.

We cannot know what precisely is going behind the curtains, but my bet is that Verizon and Comcast would like to charge Cogent for access to their eyeballs, and hence refusing to upgrade the peering.
On grassroots levels it's also been suspected that Verizon and Comcast throttle traffic from various Cogent sources, and some of it has been on the news, comcast refusing to upgrade to fix congestion to force netflix into interconnection deal.

At the end of the day, it's all users who need traffic between verizon and cogent, or comcast and cogent who suffers. My guess is that the traffic is mostly one sided, most traffic flows from cogent network to verizon and comcast, since that is the nature.
Cogent has a vastly "upstream" biased network, while Comcast and Verizon offering the last mile has vastly "downstream" biased network - or so i would assume.
However, Cogent is scoring more and more local ISPs in other countries than the states - so we might see that change eventually.

Why shared over dedi?

In many cases shared seedbox is much better choice than a dediseedbox.

Why shared seedbox is often better choice?

• Ease of use
• Instant availability
• Cost
• Better burst capabilities
• Sometimes you get practically a dedi for shared money

Easy to use

Most of the times a dedi doesn't come setup, it's just a plain install, and you need to know how to install everything etc.

You could go with something like PMSS, but it still requires you to set it up and knowing how to administer the server, updates, creating users etc.

Shared service has already all of this covered.

Instant availability

Shared and semidedi seedboxes are usually instantly available, no waiting period etc. just login and start using it. Even if a dedicated server is provided to you within seconds like many providers do, you still need to install everything and that could easily take up an hour or two.

Cost

Obviously a shared service is going to be much cheaper almost all of the time. Certainly, there is ultra cheap dedis on the market as well, but they often have a setup fee associated with them or other hardships, and often are so weak as to be barely usable.

Better peak performance

Say you get a 10Gbps seedbox from someone like Feralhosting, you are going to see 5Gbps+ peaks at least down. To get a dedicated like that would cost you hundreds a month, but with someone like Feralhosting it's going to be tens of euros. Sure, they have huge markup, and huge amount of users per server to be able to offer that service for tens of euros, but you will also benefit from their optimizations.

There is also plans where you are going to see ultra stable performance despite being shared, for example a 1Gbps seedbox with just 100Mbps upstream capability and traffic limited seedbox, so you get a nice middle ground between dedicated and shared :)

Sometimes you get tons more than you bargained for

With shared services you have the potential to get tons more than what you bargained for, sometimes the other users on the server barely use any resources what so ever, or it's mostly empty server waiting for new signups. Think about it, dediseedbox for shared seedbox money! :O

New Kimsufi dedis

Been using a new kimsufi 500G dedi. that's insanely affordable at 4,99€ a mo + VAT. You can't really get the VAT removed in any case, they don't respond to those requests even if you are eligible for vat removal and support... you can forget getting any even semi-decent support from them, it's basicly just a forum these days.

Anyways, the server was setup fast, the new management gui is convenient and quick to use, very simple, but also limited and slightly buggy in it's attempt to be so dynamic.

for basic servers a no frills no chills service which offers quite a lot for the money - but knowing from the history if you use a lot of bandwidth they might demand at any moment more money from you.

For something basic like a IRC shell box and "file locker" it's very nice :) but for a bit more punch and stability i'd look elsewhere.