There doesn't seem to be much info on this out there and noticed many of our customers, prospects, and most people in industry have no clue. This not only affects your current business having less latency, lag, & loss of connection/downtime for hosting companies, but also current and future business for bloggers, ECommerce, and all site owners as more than a 3 second delay to load webpage results in 40% or more people leaving your site. So here is directions how to find out this KEY Info for choosing provider. Link to original page following for more info and outdated example-http://www.cybercon.com/backbone.html.

Having multiple Internet backbone connections will not only provide the redundancy of your Internet Server's Internet connections, but it also improves the performance of your webpage or application serving. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) efficiently routes traffic by choosing the shortest path available to deliver your webpages to end users. What this means is data will be sent to the user, say on ATT network, through the ATT backbone, and data will be sent to the user, say on Verizon (MCI/UUNET) network, through the Verizon (MCI/UUNET) backbone. If one backbone fails, BGP will automatically reroute your traffic to other working backbone connections.

It is important for you to find out what Internet backbone providers your hosting center is using, and how reliable and scalable these backbones are. You shouldn't be surprised if you find hosting centers claiming Internet backbone connections they don't have. Some hosting centers use second tier and third tier backbone providers that have limited capacity (such as OC3 or OC12) in their intra-city backbone links. It is important for you to check out these backbone providers' network maps. Most backbone providers put their network maps on their web sites.

With a little research, you can find a hosting center's direct Internet backbone connections. Public network tools and databases allow you to check a hosting center's direct Internet backbone connections. Here is how:

Disclaimer: All the tools and sites used here are not hosted at Cybercon data centers. These are third party independent tools and websites.

Step One: Find out the hosting center's AS number(or back bone numbers)

AS Numbers (Autonomous System Numbers) are assigned by ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) to each major ISP or hosting center in North America. With an AS number, a hosting center can route traffic via the shortest path utilizing BGP. Each hosting company, regardless how many data centers they have, should only have one AS number.

Here are two ways you can find out a hosting center's AS number:

* Go to Cogent's Looking Glass at-http://www.cogentco.com/en/network/looking-glass;
Select BGP under "Test" & US- Washington, DC under "Router Location";
Enter IP address wanting to test,or enter the hosting center's web site address (e.g. www.cybercon.com);
Click on "Go!"


Step two: find out the direct Internet backbone connections of a hosting center

Once you have the hosting cetner's AS(Autonomous System) number, say AS 7393 for Cybercon, you enter the URL with such AS number direct to your web browser:

http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS7393

(You will need to replace AS7393 above to whatever AS number you found for the hosting center you are interested in.)

(Above link is outdated example to not disclose any current sensitive info.)

*Cybercon's current Internet Backbone Providers consist of 3 of top five available including Level 3, TeliaSonera, Cogent, and Century Link.
*Feel free to compare to our former Internet Backbones or find out about our Four 10 Gb fiber connections Network and review Our 4 Tier 1 Internet Backbone Maps here-*http://www.cybercon.com/data-center-network