Hosting services providers like to hold back the unpopular parameters of their services. You will usually find information on aggregation or shared connection on the very last page of the general terms and conditions. A magnifying glass necessary. You will not encounter such policy in Coolhousing.
The telecommunication market in the Czech Republic has developed differently to comparable foreign markets due to poor competition. The natural parameters of services in the Czech environment have become rather a laughing stock and a note stated in fine print at the very bottom of the page in the terms of trade, if at all. Aggregation or shared connection definitely belongs among those parameters.
Aggregation became a shame worthy of withholding from customers during times when up to fifty household users shared one ADSL line. The distribution of the available capacity was not technically designed well and some operators even aggregated problematic users (i.e.: those who used their connection frequently) to one shared connection so that the “regular” (less active and thus more profitable) customers would not be inconvenienced. However, reasonably set aggregation is a natural part of the internet connection from households to rack cabinets in large providers of colocation.
Imagine the size of the connection capacity that would have to be purchased by individual providers if the connections they offered were not shared. For example, if an average regional provider of optical connection for households served 1,000 customers, out of which each would order 100 Mb/s connection speed, the provider would have to purchase 1,000 Ă— 100 Mb/s, i.e. 100 Gb/s to provide unshared connectivity. Under the current conditions, ten such small providers would not be enough to use up the total current connected capacity of all links in the NIX.CZ internet node.
Although some providers do not like to admit it, aggregation of connections is common practice even in server housing services. Coolhousing currently operates about 1000 servers in its data centre. A connection with the capacity of 10 Gb/s leads to the NIX internet node. 14 % of that capacity is used on average. If each of the 1000 servers were to be connected at the guaranteed 100 Mb/s, Coolhousing would have to increase its connection capacity by 1000 %. However, in such scenario cool housing would use only 0.014% of its connection but each customer would have to be charged a full price for the guaranteed connection, which would exceed the price of aggregated lines several times, and we did not even include in this calculation a backup connection which is currently provided by an independent 10 Gb/s connection.
Proper setting of the service parameters is the prerequisite of customer satisfaction with aggregated connection. Coolhousing makes sure that each aggregated connection is shared by 24 servers at the most, while the peak load does not exceed more than 20 %. Servers connected with a speed of 100 Mb/s send data with a speed over 70 Mb/s on average and download data with a speed of about 80 Mb/s on average. We guarantee 20 % of the declared capacity of the shared line as the absolute minimum.
As aggregation is a common parameter of the services of connection providers, dedicated lines are always available for critical applications of the most demanding customers. The user does not have to share such a connection with anyone else but the price for the convenience exceeds the aggregated connection several times. The guaranteed connection is literally a luxury article that is only worth buying for the most demanding applications.
Aggregation of connection is a natural part of ISP services and it is the only possibility for obtaining the current convenient combination of a high-quality service, speed of individual connections and reasonable price for housing or server lease. Some providers withhold information about aggregation. Coolhousing plays fair.