Load up some sites using the hosting in question and try to download some
similarly sized videos and look at the speed. After all, you really don't care
who they are buying bandwidth from, you care how fast it is. Bandwidth is always
oversold, and the extent to which it's oversold matters much more than who
it's purchased from.

As Luke said, Cogent used to have higher latency, higher jitter, and lower price -
exactly what you WANT for an adult site. The gap isn't that big any more, though
Cogent is still a "value" provider.

Don't pay to much attention to the words "tier 1". They are almost always "redefining"
the word for marketing purposes, not actually using tier 1 providers. In fact,
Cogent is, or was the last time I checked, a tier 1. That may have changed.
Tier 1 and quality are two different things. Tier 1 basically refers to how big the
company is, as evidenced by the contracts they have with other companies.
AOL may be huge, but that doesn't mean they don't suck.

There are two or three factors in connection quality, as opposed to throughput.
Throughput is measured in Mbps, or GB / month, and tell how MUCH bandwidth.
Latency is a measure of quality, measuring how many milliseconds it takes for a
single packet to get from your server to your customer, or vice versa. That's
important for low bandwidth applications like telnet or SSH, where you want to
send a single keystroke to the server very quickly. Gamers pay attention to
latency because in a fight they want their moves sent to the server faster than
than their opponents moves. If they can react a few thousands of a second
faster than their opponent, they may win the fight.

What's the difference between latency, which is a measure of speed, and
bandwidth, which is also a measure of speed? A fast motorcycle has good
latency, it can get a small package there fast. It's bandwidth sucks, though,
it can't carry much. A semi truck has good bandwidth - it can get a lot of stuff there
today. The truck has bad latency, though, it takes it a while to get moving and
get where it needs to go. Videos are big, so what matters for video and 100K+
images is bandwidth. Latency doesn't matter because you don't care if it takes a
few thousands of a second longer for the video to start downloading. What you
care about is how long it takes to finish carrying all of the video, so you want a semi,
not a motorcycle. So latency isn't that important for adult sites. High bandwidth, at
a reasonable cost, is what you what for video, so Cogent fits the bill nicely.

The other commonly measured part of quality is jitter. Jitter answers the question
"how variable is the latency". That is, if one 4Kb packet takes 30ms, will the next
one also take about 30ms, or will it maybe be quite different, with the next packet
taking 10ms, or 60ms? For web sites, that normally doesn't matter, though it
can affect some types of streaming video. Jitter matters mainly for VOIP and
similar real time applications. It can make a voice "quiver".

What matters more to you is something which isn't a part of wholesale deals.
All web hosts oversell their bandwidth, even if they say they don't. That means
that each of your customers is competing with other people's customers to use
the hosts connection to the backbone. For example, if the host has a 1,000 Mbps
connection and their are 1,000 people using it, each person will download at about
1 Mbs. We can call this the "bandwidth per connection". Right now, we are
testing a third data center and "bandwidth per connection" is a problem with
the new one. They sold us 100 Mbps, and we could use 100 Mbps, if 50
customers were downloading at a time. Each customer only gets about 2 Mbps
per connection. I'm about to contact them and renegotiate, getting connected to
a different switch where each connection can get at least 10 Mbps.

So in summary, Cogent, a value provider, is actually pretty well matched for adult
sites, where you want high bandwidth and low cost, but don't care much about
latency and don't care at all about jitter. Per connection bandwidth is more
important, and is largely determined by to what extent the bandwidth is oversold
and can only be determined reliably by testing.

By the way, don't forget to consider the people you're working with too.
For the infrastructure that runs your business, you probably want people
who really know what they're doing, and many,many web hosts don't know
much about anything but marketing. One of the largest hosts isn't even
allowed to get in the building where their servers are, but instead contracts
all work on the servers to the company that owns the data center. The host,
one of the largest, is really just a marketing company. Ask a perspective host
what the two measurements of bandwidth quality are and see if they immediately
know the answer - "latency and jitter". Ask them how they choose a RAID card
and see if it sounds like they know what they are talking about. "We use brand X"
isn't an answer. The question is "how do you choose a brand, why do you use
brand X". Most hosts will have no idea. That happens to be where we're strong.
We don't have the cheapest bandwidth, but we actually know what the heck we're doing.





Ray