Industry practice for BGP costs - one time or fixed/monthly?
Hello everyone I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs? Thanks! -- Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network! Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854>
IMHO the only reason(s) would be to discourage people from asking for it, or as a $$ grab. -jim On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Anurag Bhatia <me@anuragbhatia.com> wrote:
Hello everyone
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs?
Thanks!
--
Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network!
Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854>
Price is probably for high availability and high SLA standards. Ashish Rastogi ________________________________________ From: Anurag Bhatia [me@anuragbhatia.com] Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 12:01 PM To: NANOG Mailing List Subject: Industry practice for BGP costs - one time or fixed/monthly? Hello everyone I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs? Thanks! -- Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network! Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854> http://www.csscorp.com/common/email-disclaimer.php
Le vendredi 25 mai 2012 à 16:04 +0000, Ashish Rastogi a écrit :
Price is probably for high availability and high SLA standards.
Yes, hopefully not for simple BGP route exchange...! :) mh
Ashish Rastogi
________________________________________ From: Anurag Bhatia [me@anuragbhatia.com] Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 12:01 PM To: NANOG Mailing List Subject: Industry practice for BGP costs - one time or fixed/monthly?
Hello everyone
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs?
Thanks!
--
Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network!
Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854> http://www.csscorp.com/common/email-disclaimer.php
I know we dislike BGP on small connections (even though we do it), it is an extra administrative hassle that tends to be the most work on the smallest connections. Customers with multiple 10Gs tend to have small numbers of BGP related tickets than customers with a single fastE, given that, I can understand why soneone would want to charge, especially when it breaks the cookie-cutter templates that they are using for their low margin servers. While something might be technically easy, don't forget that breaking automated proccesses does tend to cause administrative pain, that could be what the fees are for recouping. John
There are starting to be a major difference in cost for supporting bgp. Taking a look at routing table size, many people are going to see troubles around 512k routes. Placing you on a device that doesn't need a full table or one at all will result in lower capital costs and lower operational costs as fewer features need to be toyed with. Static routes work on nearly every device :-) - Jared On May 25, 2012, at 12:01 PM, Anurag Bhatia <me@anuragbhatia.com> wrote:
Hello everyone
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs?
Thanks!
--
Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network!
Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854>
The only thing that I can really think of is that the BGP sessions do take up extra CPU time and memory on the routing engine, so there is an additional cost to the provider in terms of needing more routers and/or bigger routers if they have lots of customers speaking BGP to them that they may not have factored in to their standard pricing. I guess there is also some extra cost in terms of NOC staff and systems to monitor the sessions as well as providing any troubleshooting etc. that they wouldn't have to do with "standard" customers that are statically routed. Edward Dore Freethought Internet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anurag Bhatia" <me@anuragbhatia.com> To: "NANOG Mailing List" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Friday, 25 May, 2012 5:01:11 PM Subject: Industry practice for BGP costs - one time or fixed/monthly? Hello everyone I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs? Thanks! -- Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network! Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854>
Edward's response nailed this one on the head. It has to do with the additional support/hardware required to support a BGP session. Granted, once a BGP session is established it rarely requires any tweaking, but I've spent hours troubleshooting a downed BGP session because the client's IPS signature update decided TCP/179 was malicious. You also have to implement additional filters to protect yourself from what your client can advertise. I'm lucky enough to work for a major ISP with pretty sophisticated filters built off the public route registry, but not all ISPs have this functionality. Adam On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Edward J. Dore < edward.dore@freethought-internet.co.uk> wrote:
The only thing that I can really think of is that the BGP sessions do take up extra CPU time and memory on the routing engine, so there is an additional cost to the provider in terms of needing more routers and/or bigger routers if they have lots of customers speaking BGP to them that they may not have factored in to their standard pricing.
I guess there is also some extra cost in terms of NOC staff and systems to monitor the sessions as well as providing any troubleshooting etc. that they wouldn't have to do with "standard" customers that are statically routed.
Edward Dore Freethought Internet
----- Original Message ----- From: "Anurag Bhatia" <me@anuragbhatia.com> To: "NANOG Mailing List" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Friday, 25 May, 2012 5:01:11 PM Subject: Industry practice for BGP costs - one time or fixed/monthly?
Hello everyone
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs?
Thanks!
--
Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network!
Linkedin <http://in.linkedin.com/in/anuragbhatia21> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/anurag_bhatia>| Google+ <https://plus.google.com/118280168625121532854>
On 5/25/12 3:08 PM, Adam wrote:
You also have to implement additional filters to protect yourself from what your client can advertise. I'm lucky enough to work for a major ISP with pretty sophisticated filters built off the public route registry, but not all ISPs have this functionality.
Is it really that hard to use a simple prefix list containing the one prefix they're allowed to announce and default deny everything else? ~Seth
On 5/25/12 15:12 , Seth Mattinen wrote:
On 5/25/12 3:08 PM, Adam wrote:
You also have to implement additional filters to protect yourself from what your client can advertise. I'm lucky enough to work for a major ISP with pretty sophisticated filters built off the public route registry, but not all ISPs have this functionality.
Is it really that hard to use a simple prefix list containing the one prefix they're allowed to announce and default deny everything else?
If it's built off a registry, the customer can change it without direct coordination which is a huge labor saving activity.
~Seth
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 09:31:11PM +0530, Anurag Bhatia wrote:
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting. One thing which surprises me is the "setup costs" for BGP. Few providers quoted additional $50-100 which looks OK but a few of them quoted as high as $150 *extra every month* just for having BGP (no full routing table, but just default route pointing). Is there's any technical logic behind such heavy costs? I mean at the end of day we are all talking at layer 3 and thus it does not involves any hard connection/physical work. What other members pay for BGP setup costs?
We pay what our providers think they can get away with. Like most pricing decisions, they're not based on any "technical logic", they're based on what the market will bear. Feel free to turn the process around -- decide what the service is worth to you, tell the provider of the service that price, and let them decide if they want to provide it to you at that price. Don't be too surprised if you get monkeys in exchange for your peanuts, though. - Matt
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:06:03AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
We pay what our providers think they can get away with. Like most pricing decisions, they're not based on any "technical logic", they're based on what the market will bear. Feel free to turn the process around -- decide what the service is worth to you, tell the provider of the service that price, and let them decide if they want to provide it to you at that price. Don't be too surprised if you get monkeys in exchange for your peanuts, though.
Are you suggesting that you get worse service after you negotiate a better deal with a particular provider? I mean, certainly the different providers have different levels of quality, but my experience has been that with a particular provider, you get the same service regardless of how well you negotiated, assuming you eventually came to an agreement. (quite often, in fact, I see the customer that asks for more... quite often gets more, without paying more. We've all had that 'difficult customer' that consumes far more support hours than what they pay could possibly buy. Quite often, that same customer negotiated a better deal, too. It's a cost of selecting for customers that are good at negotiation that most businesspeople don't take into account.) Back to negotiating for initial prices: as far as I can tell, this is largely a matter of knowing the market. The high initial prices are there so that the people that are unable or unwilling to put in the effort to find what the real market prices are pay a lot more. I know as my own business has progressed? the prices I pay even for the same unit of commodities that don't fall in price (like rack space) goes down fairly dramatically every year, simply because I understand the market better.
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:39:16PM -0400, Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:06:03AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
We pay what our providers think they can get away with. Like most pricing decisions, they're not based on any "technical logic", they're based on what the market will bear. Feel free to turn the process around -- decide what the service is worth to you, tell the provider of the service that price, and let them decide if they want to provide it to you at that price. Don't be too surprised if you get monkeys in exchange for your peanuts, though.
Are you suggesting that you get worse service after you negotiate a better deal with a particular provider?
To a certain extent, yes. It has been my experience (from both the service provider and the customer point-of-view) that customers who aren't worth as much to a supplier don't get as much "love", because the cost of losing their business to a competitor is much less (or, in some cases, would be a net win). However, my main point was that if you are mainly concerned about price, rather than quality of service (or, more precisely, the value-for-money ratio between the two), you are likely to end up with a substandard service. I will concede, however, that I didn't make that point particularly clear, for which I apologise. - Matt -- Advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing. -- Jacob Gabrielson
On 5/26/12, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org> wrote:
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:39:16PM -0400, Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:06:03AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
We pay what our providers think they can get away with. Like most decisions, they're not based on any "technical logic", they're based on Are you suggesting that you get worse service after you negotiate a deal with a particular provider? To a certain extent, yes. It has been my experience (from both the service provider and the customer point-of-view) that customers who aren't worth as much to a supplier don't get as much "love", because the cost of losing their business to a competitor is much less (or, in some cases, would be a [snip] An org that negotiated a lower price per service are not necessarily "worth" less, because measurement of worth is complicated. Might
Whether $150/month or so just for BGP on a low-speed (sub-100M) link is reasonable or not depends on the SP. If there is 1 BGP customer, YOU, or even 1 to 10 customers, then it sounds reasonable to me; even downright cheap, when you consider deploying a custom service may require additional training of support staff, more required involvement of higher level network architects, and require additional review of future network changes. And the don't know in advance how many times you will be calling in about that BPG session, and requiring assistance from an engineer well-versed in BGP, not just standard Frontline or 2nd level support work. purchase more services, might require fewer support/"free consulting" incidents, caused by issues that have nothing in the service provider's control, such as customer-owned router crashing; they might have more associates that will listen to their recommendations about who to buy service from.. too little love may get an influential "I recommend against using this provider, because...." Support SLA, Service SLA, and all other expectations should be part of the negotiation; otherwise you run the risk that your unstated expectations will not be met, because there may be unstated tradeoff/benefits removed for offering the low price that you did not include in the negotiation. If the amount proposed isn't worth the level of service, the provider needs to disclose that upfront, probably in the form of a counteroffer -- -JH
On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 12:34:22PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:39:16PM -0400, Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:06:03AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
... Feel free to turn the process around -- decide what the service is worth to you, tell the provider of the service that price, and let them decide if they want to provide it to you at that price. Don't be too surprised if you get monkeys in exchange for your peanuts, though.
Are you suggesting that you get worse service after you negotiate a better deal with a particular provider?
To a certain extent, yes. It has been my experience (from both the service provider and the customer point-of-view) that customers who aren't worth as much to a supplier don't get as much "love", because the cost of losing their business to a competitor is much less (or, in some cases, would be a net win).
From a "business logic" perspective, I agree that it seems like you describe the way it ought to be. Sometimes at very small companies?
How is this communicated to the people doing the support? is there a 'cheap jerk' bit in the database? Until I got my own company, working as the technical guy in another company, I was never told what a customer was paying. I mean, I could see what plan they were on, but as a technical person I don't see the price they are paying unless I go directly into the billing database, and that sort of thing is usually super secret. this is the case. I remember a few times, the boss telling me "customer X is a big deal. go out of your way for them" - but that happens less and less as the company gets bigger. Think, for a moment; if it's not in the database in an easily accessible manner, even if you do all the negotiation yourself, how many customers would you need before you lost track of who underpaid and who overpaid? for me, the limit would be around 5. I bet even a professional relationship manager would have a hard time around 100 or so. Of all my current providers, the worst response I get from sales is from the provider that I'm paying full price for. I mean, maybe that's because they see themselves as premium and I'm small? but maybe that's because I showed weakness by accepting the list price. Or maybe it's because when I met the salesperson I was driving a cheap car and dressed for work. I don't know.
Hello, On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Anurag Bhatia <me@anuragbhatia.com> wrote:
Hello everyone
I have been aggressively looking for deals in servers in Europe for anycasting.
If you're looking for stuff in "Europe" (I'm assuming Western European EU member states, rather than states bordering Russia or the Middle East) one place you may wish to try is UKNOF (http://www.uknof.org.uk) they have the UK equivalent of the NANOG mailing list, so will be able to help you more with UK (and their neighbours) specific questions; it's a different market there remember - "industry standards" are different! The UK and Ireland are also pretty good places geographically for server locations, with lots of fat pipes to mainland Europe and across the Atlantic to North America; there is a reason people like Amazon put their data centers there. HTH, Alex
participants (14)
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Adam -
Alex Brooks -
Anurag Bhatia -
Ashish Rastogi -
Edward J. Dore -
Jared Mauch -
jim deleskie -
Jimmy Hess -
Joel jaeggli -
John van Oppen -
Luke S. Crawford -
Matthew Palmer -
Michael Hallgren -
Seth Mattinen