If you go to website of any hosting provider, you will find the details of their network connectivity under technical details. Most of the service providers tell you that they have a Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with their ISP. While it is tru that they are connected to a Gigabit Ethernet port with ISP, the connection will be rate-limited. For example, if you are using a host A for hosting your website, they will be connected on a Gigabit Ethernet link with their ISP. ISP on their router will rate-limit such connection with a bandwidth of 10 Mbits/sec. So effectively, your host will be having an effective upstream bandwidth of 10 Mbits/sec. If your hosting provider is not a very big one, hosting thousands and thousands of sites, then Gigabit Ethernet connectivity will not be of any use to them. For a hosting provider hosting 100 sites, 15-20 Mbits/sec would be more than enough. Although it will not affect your service in anyway, if you choose a good hosting provider, they are giving you wrong information.
Another thing which I have noticed is that the hosting providers generally do not speak of their connectivity with ISPs. Ideally, a hosting provider should have connectivity from multiple ISPs. This is not only for the backup, but also will affect the speed and distance a packet has to travel to reach end users. Connectivity with different ISPs ensures that you get the best routing to reach customers. The technical term for such connectivity with multiple ISPs is “Multi-homing”. To properly route all the traffic, hosting provider needs to have a powerful router. This requires more investment and small providers will not be able to afford it.
Connectivity with different service providers are often controlled with a routing protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). I have seen advertisements by some hosting providers that they will allow you to use BGP. This is absolutely ridiculous. There is no need for you, the publisher to run BGP. BGP should be run by your hosting provider with his upstream providers. Although technically it is possible to run BGP as a daemon in your server, it is not needed and it will not be of any direct use to you.
Next time you see such advertisements, chat with the hosting provider. Most of them will not be able to provide any further information beyond such technical jargons. Here is the transcript of such a chat I had last week with a hosting provider.
Chat with a Webhost
