A little help from your friends: how to choose a peering provider
Let's talk about people who thrive on buying either the cheapest version of everything, or the first version they find without bothering to do research or compare options. Sure, there are times in life when the cheapest, most readily available version will do just fine, such as when you're buying straws. The rest of the time, to get the best return on investment and find all the benefits you’re looking for, you’ve got to do some research, and you might not get to choose the cheapest option. This includes when you're choosing a peering provider. A subpar peering provider will make you think peering is a ridiculous idea, but it's actually incredibly beneficial.
The advantage over transit
The internet is made up of an unimaginable number of connected networks. These networks belong to large ISPs, Tier 1 carriers, hosting providers, corporations, small businesses, and universities. When traffic flows, it typically does so across multiple ISPs in order to reach its destination. This is called transit.
Transit is made possible by agreements between networks. The closer an ISP is to the backbone of the internet, the more network connections it has, and therefore the more transit it controls. Smaller ISPs and hosting providers purchase transit services from these larger networks and then pass those transit services on to their end users.
Transit, generally speaking, is a perfectly fine way of doing things. It allows traffic from any origin server to go to any destination on the internet. But transit is often an indirect and inefficient way for traffic to travel, and it can result in some major latency issues for websites. That’s where peering comes in.
This a-peering act
What peering does is cut down on all those network hops, giving traffic a much more direct route to its destination. Peering is essentially a relationship between ISPs that creates direct links between their networks, enabling a direct route for traffic as opposed to using the standard internet backbone, which is what is used in transit.
Peering physically takes place on an Ethernet switch/set of switches or route servers that have hundreds of ports. This provides physical connectivity between the peered networks, which allows for those direct links. And while transit offers global connectivity, peering is based on local connectivity. All traffic passes through the switch/route servers, which greatly cuts down on latency.
Peering not only improves website performance and offers better reliability, but it also reduces transit costs and improves bandwidth usage.
What you need to know before choosing a peering provider
According to internet security firm and CDN provider Imperva Incapsula, there are three things you need to find out when choosing a peering provider.
One of the first things you need to determine is whether or not peering is the right choice for you. This question may seem like it’s a given, but there’s nothing overly simple about the understanding of your traffic patterns you require in order to make this decision. Using a monitoring tool in order to understand what networks your traffic is coming from, which ISPs, the number of requests, number of packets, bandwidth usage, type of traffic and other attributes will help you determine if it is more financially beneficial to invest in peering, or purchase transit services.
When looking at peering providers you also need to find out what the peering policies are of your potential peering providers. Policies are generally either open, which means members will likely agree to your peering request, selective, which means you may have to meet prerequisites such as minimum traffic volume in order to be accepted, or restrictive, which means they are rather unlikely to be looking for new peering partners.
Lastly, you need to find out how many members your potential peering providers have. When it comes to peering members, the more the merrier. Beyond that you also need to determine if those members connect to the networks and providers that will best serve you.
If peering is the right choice for you and you take a little time to find the provider that’s the best possible fit, you’ll be rewarded with a faster website, improved overall performance, and lower bandwidth and transit costs.