Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Working from home with cox
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Working from home with cox

jeffjeff Member
edited April 2013 in General

Hi all,
What is the worst thing about cox business internet to run a few servers if you have the power worked out for hosting my own sites? I have searched around and can't find anything on issues with bandwidth or quality of b/w. It will add $60 a month and I get 8 IPs that I can assign 5. I work from home and am 45 minutes away from the LA hub to compare putting my three servers pulling 5 amps in a DC. I am a web dev and building turnkey websites. I am tired of reseller hosting and being told what I could not host and I have VPS as well, but enjoy having my own servers after spending a decade in fortune 50 DCs maintaining them. In case anyone cares I used to live in a rural area and still have a nice genny that can run half my house when the power is out.

Comments

  • bnmklbnmkl Member

    Haha

  • danodano Member

    Sure, you could host your entire web experience off of Cox Business internet, but I haven't seen it perform as advertised. I was admin of some machines for a small (20 people)Las Vegas business who was running everything in their office off of Cox, and it was slow at peak times, everyday. When I arrived at 6am in the morning, HTTP response times were good, at mostly sub 200ms from remote monitors - come around 8:30-9am, this would jump to 400-500ms minimal, with some time-outs - you can almost feel every user on Cox come online, as your experience degrades. The rest of the day, it is usually better as folks slow their internet usage and eventually leave the office. If you have fiber available from Cox in your area, it maybe a better bet (i assume anyways).

  • jeffjeff Member

    AT&T just put the fiber box 5 houses away, but it is copper to the house. I haven't checked out their pricing, but thanks for the info on cox.

  • MicrolinuxMicrolinux Member
    edited April 2013

    @jeff said: What is the worst thing about cox business internet to run a few servers

    The repair SLA (or lack thereof in comparison to a true business class service), especially wait until Force Majeure is declared . . . .

    Good/decent performance now is meaningless, you are almost surely connected to massively oversubscribed CMTS

    Clueless support techs

    Your generator is useless unless you have an ATS or are there to start it up and keep it fueled

  • I have to agree with @Microlinux.

    We have a Cox business connection at the office. We run a in-house development server which nearly none of our out-of-office employees use due to the latency and relatively low upstream speed. And if we're doing video Skype, the performance gets much worse.

    One day our office connection went completely down. I saw a Cox truck in the lot, so I went to ask them about it. They said that they expected the downtime since they were running new cables. Their method of running the new cables was 1) cut all the existing cables, 2) remove the old cables and bin them, 3) run new cables, 4) connect the new cables, 5) pretend that nothing happened. This was with no notice and resulted in more than 30 minutes of downtime. I would have asked why they didn't run the new cables first, but the guy was so blatant about how poor their plan was that I didn't think that he would care.

    We also frequently have issues where Cox's DNS servers will completely fail for many hours at a time. We're quite used to switching over to other DNS providers such as Google's public DNS. And when the servers are fixed, we aren't notified and no explanation is given.

    Two years or so ago, we had massive latency issues on the connection complete with some packet loss. We had techs coming out for more than a week. They replaced the modem (which was fine), they replaced some lines (which were fine), and did a whole lot of sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing. Then they finally realized that one of the connectors on the external line was damaged, causing signal issues. Why they never bothered to actually check the entire line until more than a week had gone by since it is only about 300 feet of cable still baffles me.

    Last year we ran into an issue where our connection completely failed but the office next to ours, which also used Cox, had no problems. We ended up piggybacking on their connection since it took Cox more than two days to fix the issue. The tech never told me what the actual issue was, but from his numbers, it affected roughly 40% of the area.

    Is Cox a good ISP? Given that our only other broadband option here is AT&T DSL (which I used to run and is laughably poor), I have to say yes. Are they business grade? Not really.

    Paying the business premium gives relatively more consistent speeds than residential (which I also have), produces live techs on phone calls much faster, and costs a pretty premium extra. Does it give connection quality sufficient to run servers off of with 99.9%+ uptime? Not in my experience. Does it give top-level quality techs? Again, not in my experience.

  • jeffjeff Member

    @Microlinux said: Your generator is useless unless you have an ATS or are there to start it up and keep it fueled

    Not too worried for what it will serve. The power goes out twice a year. But I have already decided against doing anything with cox.

  • My tip: do outcall only instead

  • SPSP Member

    @texteditor said: do outcall only

    BACKPAGED!

  • So generators are called "gennies" now?

  • jeffjeff Member

    @mojojuju said: So generators are called "gennies" now?

    In the trailer park I lived at they were... LOL

  • Put it this way. You host someone's website, huge storm hits, power goes out, you run out of gas (DC's have contracts for fuel delivery), Customer may have business and is now losing money, finds out that their website is in some guys basement. Sues you. The end.

Sign In or Register to comment.