Hello,
Has anyone tried to use Hurricane Electric ISP custom routing via BGP communities ?
I thought that a provider with such a Tier would allow customers to influence inbound (to customer) routing using additional BGP communities.
But seems they don’t have free service for that, they’re offering $200/mo fee per session to make the custom communities work. I’m shocked:)
Nope, for that exact reason. AS6939 is the only transit provider that charges to use BGP communities AFAIK. It’s just another way for them to make $$$ and the only way it’ll change is to vote with your feet.
There are a lot of great ISPs with full bgp communities support. Just use them.
I wish this would have good outcomes, but almost no customers use
advanced features, which cost money to develop and maintain.
Likely by voting with your feet, support expensive customers aggregate
to feature full companies, and support cheap customers aggregate to
feature empty companies, creating perverse incentive, especially in
such markets as IP transit, which is largely seen as interchangeable
and the only metric is cost.
Nanog is unfortunately not representative.
It always amazes me how far many Internet engineers, peering coordinators and other buyers will go to haggle every last nickel on the costs of circuits, crowd connects, space and power. Of course, everyone wants a fair deal and a fair price, myself included. But all this infrastructure costs real money to operate.
HE is nearly always the least cost transit provider in the markets they serve. I think that making a lower profit margin makes it difficult for them to justify investing in the staff time and tooling for BGP communities when the vast majority of their customers don’t care about it at all.
$200/month extra for BGP community support in the context of what the large “tier 1s” are charging for transit seems reasonable to me. If you need it, you actually need it and should pay. And based on my past experience, the HE NOC response and personal attention will be superior to nearly anyone else.
Also seems a better value for money than the absurd cross connect pricing found almost everywhere, unless you meet in the street.
Speaking from personal experience here, the $200/month extra I was quoted by an HE sales rep in the past was only for local-pref modification communities within their own network. It seems the only other action community they support is RTBH which doesn’t at all compare with what other tier 1 providers support when it comes to being able to (at least partially) control where your traffic goes or doesn’t go.
Where this explanation breaks (at least for me) is that since they offer BGP communities features for a fee, they clearly have already put in the time to develop/deploy the config necessary for it, and allowing use of it really doesn't cost them anything.
The additional charge (per circuit) may not be much, but it's nickel and diming, and something I'll try to remember the next time an employer is considering adding HE as a transit. When shopping for transit in the past, BGP community support has always been a requirement.
Maybe they are trying to recoup those costs they invested in the development.
Hurricane is the LEAST nickel and diming outfit around. They’re one of the only places i know of that doesn’t charge an MRC on cross-connects.
Between the no MRC on XCs, awesome and responsive tech support, i whole-heartedly recommend them.
If you want some examples of datacenters that nickel and dime you to death, feel free to shoot me an email and i’ll share some recent horror stories from another provider…
Cheers,
Mike
Where this explanation breaks (at least for me) is that since they
offer BGP communities features for a fee, they clearly have already
put in the time to develop/deploy the config necessary for it, and
allowing use of it really doesn't cost them anything.
by that logic, they should give me transit for free
randy
One possibility is that customers using more advanced features may cause themselves odd issues and make troubleshooting their connectivity more difficult since it is less "standard" of a connection at that point. Thus, there exists the potential for more customer support costs.
John Stitt
Not surprised.
They also charge $200/mo for a BFD session… not exactly a microtransaction approach here.
Michael
I wish this would have good outcomes, but almost no customers use
advanced features, which cost money to develop and maintain.Likely by voting with your feet, support expensive customers aggregate
to feature full companies, and support cheap customers aggregate to
feature empty companies, creating perverse incentive, especially in
such markets as IP transit, which is largely seen as interchangeable
and the only metric is cost.
Yes, the challenge I've seen here is that as randy said "so give
me free transit", the issue that i've seen is propogation of routes much
further than expected which makes things far more difficult, and this
gets worse when you talk about any sort of anycast(ed) prefixes and how
you monitor those.
It takes a lot of time as well to debug and figure out if it's
an oddity of the routing architecture or something simpler that leads to
these issues. I also know that testing all these variants can be quite
hard as well, so there's something to be said about the investment
point. Also saku is right on the below as well:
Nanog is unfortunately not representative.
- Jared
I’m not sure what features their paid BGP community version includes—is it only blackholing? Does it support not exporting to specific regions or ASNs? This could help us optimize routing. Their cost-performance ratio is very high, and they provide free IPv6 transit at the IXP. My colleague mentioned that their Layer 2 transport seems to be software-based, similar to using protocols like GRE. I believe they’re one of the few ISPs that support MTU 9000?