Cogego Peer 1 Hosting Review: What About Outage Reports? We Investigate.

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PEER 1 Hosting Introduction

Founded in 1999 by two internet mavericks, PEER 1 is self-described as “equal parts passion, persistence, guts and belief.” By breaking the mold of traditional ‘telco’ business, they removed the layers of bureaucracy and high cost. This push towards the next generation of internet services allowed them to focus on “affordability, simplicity and unprecedented response time.” Based in Canada, PEER 1 today offers ten data centers in North America and on in the UK.

As the business grew, PEER 1 began to offer more sophisticated products. Ranging from mobile applications, to gaming communities, PEER 1 offers ways in which a suite of hosting options are available over their reliable “FiberFast Network.” What PEER 1 is able to do is to offer technical infrastructure management as an outsourced service for your business. With expert employees, a long history success, a portfolio of well-known clients, and customer-focused point of view, PEER 1’s “staff are committed to making it happen.”

Services & Specializations

PEER 1 offers web hosting options for a variety of business needs, they are flexible in both scale and in application. These services fall into one of a few broad categories which include managed hosting, cloud on-demand, cloud hosting, and colocation.

Managed Hosting

This means that the hosting service is completely handled by PEER 1 – which could include eCommerce websites, mobile applications, gaming websites, SaaS websites and digital agencies. This tier of service is geared for low to medium traffic websites, but it can be optimized for rich media sites, online shopping, and includes the ability to host email. Managed hosting can include shared servers, but also dedicated virtual and physical servers.

Managed Services

At a technical level, Manage Services can refer to a number of specialized business needs, which include:

  • Advanced Monitoring of application processes and system hardware
  • Security, including firewalls, intrusion detection, SSL and more.
  • Backup & Storage, using cloud storage and enterprise grade storage area networks (SAN)
  • OS & Applications, pick a managed server and then choose the applications you need managed.
  • Load Balancing, to give users the best and fastest web application experience.
  • Global Load Balancing, for a higher charge, perform load balancing across over 16 global data centers.
  • Database Administration, having experts fine tune a database to run at peak performance.
  • Disaster Recovery, coming up with application emergency plans that meet recovery time objectives and budgetary needs.
  • Professional Services, performed by IT specialists whenever needed, as long as they are needed.
  • Database support, having the ability to choose Microsoft SQL or MySQL

On Demand Cloud Platform

There are two branding names for the on-demand cloud options available. The difference between normal shared hosting and cloud hosting being that Cloud hosting has representation at multiple network locations.

  • On Demand Cloud Platform – for on demand needs, a virtual cloud server can be launched in just a few simple steps and be up and running in just minutes. These instances are easy to configure with deep environment control, and offer scalability needs, with the option to ramp up or down server capacity at any time.

  • Bare metal Cloud Servers – The “Bare Metal” is the brand name for the highest performance cloud servers. These configurations can either be optimized for high-power spikes, or for long term dynamic performance swings. A Bare Metal instance is completely customizable in terms of OS and application software, plus it comes with all the best parts of managed service, including export support and “FirstCall Promise.”

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting as a hosted offering can be blurred with the “On Demand Cloud Platform” offering. However, the offerings not “On-Demand” are based on VMware versus OnApp as the hypervisor. Also, the disaster recovery options are different, the pricing models are different, and deployment time is different.

  • Mission Critical Cloud – has built-in off-site replication, has network bandwidth burst capabilities, utility-based pricing model and global redundancy across all network locations. Takes just 30 minutes to 1 hour to deploy.

  • Managed Private Cloud – a single-tenant private server with site recovery manager, with a monthly contract pricing model. Replication across major datacenters but not all locations. Takes 15 days to deliver as it is fully managed.

Colocation

Any of the datacenters in North America or the UK can be setup as colocation spots, which means that PEER 1 will manage your hardware at their site for a fee. They have locations across north america and the UK, with their largest location being the datacenter in Toronto, Canada. Services are ala cart, and need to be quoted, but come with a 100% uptime and power SLA.

Cogeco Peer 1 Reviews by Our Community

Overall Rating from 2 Reviews by Cogeco Peer 1 Customers

Support
Quality
Features
Value

Most Helpful Reviews

Peter Che avatar
Peter Che tbd.com
Jun 28, 2016

Entire Atlantic data center went down for 5 hours due to a power loss. Thousands of websites shut down during this outage. I lost $5000 of revenue and they only compensated for $200.

You don’t get any protection with their SLA. Very unprofessional technical support and customer service after they got bought out by Cogeco in 2015.

Visit Host Now →

Joan Stevens avatar
Joan Stevens non
Aug 07, 2012

This is a very reliable hosting provider with a great customer service. It does not matter at what time I call, I always got an answer immediately from specialized support specialist.

Visit Host Now →

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Infrastructure, Datacenters, Network

PEER 1 operates over 16 datacenters and 19 points of presence (PoPs) across North America and Europe, with all locations connected with their trademarked “FastFiber Network.” This is a fiber-optic network which has over 25,000 miles of laid cable and runs at speeds of around 10 GBps.

PEER 1 locations include Vancouver, Seattle, San Jose, Santa Clara, Fremont, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Ashburn, Herndon, Sterling, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Montreal, London, Portsmouth, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris. This network is connected through over 1500 network providers and multiple Tier 1 upstream providers. This comprehensive global coverage means that a 100% SLA is possible.

The core operations of this network are run from the Toronto data center, which has three separate facilities and a Network Operations Center (NOC) which has extensive real-time monitoring.

Support, Security, Backups & Server Monitoring

The Network Operations Center provides global support, 24/7, with PEER1’s “First Call Promise” which means less time waiting for help and nearly immediate assistance. Serious issues are escalated to the senior network engineering teams in less than 10 minutes. With persistent health monitoring and backup support bundled into most hosting plans, there is no issue too big or too small to bring to the attention of the PEER1 support team.

Uptime Guarantee

PEER1 has an incredible nearly 100% uptime Service License Agreement for many of its plans. The “Mission Critical Cloud” and “On Demand Services” have the strongest uptime guarantee for network connectivity. Managed and dedicated services have a replacement guarantee for faulty hardware, and will offer a service credit for each hour downtime stated for that particular service level.

Billing & Payment Policy

Each hosting option has a different base monthly cost, each one has different pricing, and the cloud options have variable pricing based on chosen resource amounts. Interested customers are recommended to reach out to a sales assistant to figure out what service offering is the right place to start.

Bandwidth billing for managed hosting is an option which makes it cheaper and easier to deal with variable rates of traffic, and to pay for spikes individually rather than to have bandwidth costs bump up after a spike. For business to business cases, IP monitoring can be used for seeing which site visitors are draining the most bandwidth. Additionally, bandwidth monitoring is possible through their dashboard interface.

Summary & Conclusion

PEER1 has an enormous commitment to their customers, and over a decade of experience in building up a sophisticated global fiber network. This has provided accolades in Canada’s Profit 100, top scores from web host awards, becoming a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and a Redhat Advanced partner. Their core values include:

  • Every Interaction Matters
  • Enable Others to Succeed
  • Strive for Excellence
  • Anything is Possible
  • Sense of Fun and Play

PEER 1 takes its responsibilities seriously, winning high profile customers and fantastic reviews. Most of the service levels offered by PEER 1 are business focused and built for quick scaling. The drawback from this, is that some of those service tiers might not be ideal for small scale projects or blogs trying to keep the monthly cost extremely low. The highest amount of value offered by PEER 1 comes from their ability to offer cost-effective managed hosting with a very thorough technical infrastructure behind them. Their organization is optimized to help businesses of all sizes in delivering web application support at peak performance.

Mission Critical Cloud
Disk Space17GB
Bandwidth
Price $86.40 / mo
Usual price:  Get  % off!
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Tom Riecken

About Tom Riecken

Tom has worked as a web developer and data analyst. He is involved with several global and local "futurist" organizations, where he often facilitates discussions about the social impact of technology. His strongest recreational interests include spaceflight, astronomy, and realistic science fiction. He lives in Washington.

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