Vladville: Nastier than ever

Vladville is back and its nastier than ever. Early Friday I went to Dallas to work on a few systems and do major overhaul of Vladville. Thanks in part to the SBS Show this site now sustains the kind of traffic that makes my customers cry when I show them a quote proposal. Seeing how everyone is paying so much money for this content, I decided to stop the bleeding and move Vladville onto Cogent. Cogent is the 6th biggest network world-wide, tier-1 bandwidth carrier (meaning they don't pay for peering) and most notorious for hosting porn sites. So expect nudity! Cogent is something you usually would not give to your worst enemy. It had such a bad track record of routing packets on its own network through some 20 routers before it reached its destination nearly 20 feet away. It also had a shady past with PSI net and more recently for not agreeing to a peering arrangement with Level 3 where for a good part of a week if you were on Cogent and your customer was on Level 3 (or vice versa) your packets were not getting there. In data center talk its almost a profanity to mention its name, some even advertise under "NO Cogent" flag. Very amusing. But in January Marc Urchin was giving me a tour of the expansion one of our Dallas DC's was undergoing and I asked about the Cogent plans. Same usual laughs and potshots but when I asked about the reliability he told me it was out for five minutes in 2005. Five minutes? I've floored Vladville for a day and didn't notice. I forgot to close an XML tag on the SBS Show feed which knocked it out for almost two weeks. I can handle five minutes! Whats a little interesting is that Vladville is no longer capped and provides no QoS at all – meaning when you hit this site is goes at 20 Mbps if I got it! Costs slightly less than what I paid for even 1Mbit of sustained traffic on Internap. Plus you gotta love the neighbors. Now how do I abuse this bandwidth?