Shard Server location

[fixxer1963]

I keep hearing rumors about where the server is. Some say it is in Canada, some say it is in the US. Where exactly is it? I assume the main owner, whoever that may be, is still somewhere in Europe, but I could be wrong there.

[Unbeliever]

For quite a while now the next-to-last three hops on my traceroute to the server are through Cogent, which is a Canadian company.

[+Colibri]

Server is in Canada, but I'm from Slovenia. I hope the lag is favorable for you all in the americas

[Wil]

Cogent, which is a Canadian company.

Cogent is the "price player" in North America. They sell Internet backbone bandwidth cheaper than anyone else on a best efforts basis. Their service footprint is essentially everywhere here but they have more border congestion than anyone else. The resulting packet loss creates network lag during busy times, particularly to and from the old phone and cable companies in North America.

Within the industry, the rule of thumb is: Cogent is *never* your sole provider but often your second provider. Anybody using Cogent as a sole provider is frankly a fool -- they've had week-long outages disconnecting them (and their customers) from large parts of the Internet.

[Unbeliever]

Funny story: I always have some packet loss - and sometimes more than just some - from Cogent. I emailed them with the ips of switches that were down and hadn't been functioning for weeks, and they wrote back and asked for my "customer number". I wrote them again and said I'm not a customer, just someone telling you what you ought to already know - where your broken equipment is. When that went nowhere, I left a bad review on the Iweb Facebook page - which, at their request, Facebook removed and followed up with a message threatening cancellation of my account. Never pays to be the little guy.