I want to contribute to the page Good Bad ISPs, since I noticed my ISP was missing and I wanted to make it easier for people to find the relevant information about them. However, I soon realised that I don’t fully understand the contents of the page.
What do the country sections mean?
Let’s take 100UP Hosting as an example. It’s a company registered in Germany. It seems to have ASN AS16276. It has servers in the following locations (according to their website): USA, Canada, Germany, UK, Singapore.
But on the Good Bad ISPs page it is listed under Netherlands with ASN AS49581 (i.e. Tube-Hosting, which seems to be a completely different company registered in Germany with a datacenter in the Netherlands).
Under which country is it supposed to be listed? I don’t understand why it’s under Netherlands instead of Germany or Canada, for example.
How do the ASNs relate to the ISP/Company name?
Let’s look at HostHatch. It’s a company registered in the US. It seems to have ASN AS63473.
But on the Good Bad ISPs page it is listed under:
Hong Kong (AS63473, i.e. HOSTHATCH, US)
Netherlands (AS42708, i.e. GleSYS AB, Sweden)
New Zealand and Australia (AS36351, i.e. SOFTLAYER, US)
Sweden (AS42708, i.e. GleSYS AB, Sweden)
US (AS46562, i.e. Performive, US)
I am very confused why, for example, the ASN listed under the US section does not belong to HostHatch, but Hong Kong is using US ASN.
I never really interacted with ISPs, hosting services or ASNs until very recently, so there are a lot of things I don’t understand. Is the information on the ISPs page correct? Is it outdated? Is it all just me misunderstanding how these companies operate?
Not sure. I’d speculate outdated.
Seems a valiant effort to centralize scattered information, but a static web page to represent dynamic information will always be a little to a lot incorrect.
Ex: Psychz networks say don’t host as too many relays, but I only see 13 when I query the listed AS: Relay Search . I don’t think 13 relays is too many or the majority of hosts will have too many.
How many relays are too many relays Ideally, it’s based on consensus weight, which changes over time as Tor relay operators come and go, prices across providers change, traffic across Tor changes, upstream routes change, etc. It’d be great if the “too many relays” section was dynamically populated based on metrics.torproject.org type content with some threshold above X% consensus weight.
Re your #1: I’d suggest either by company headquarters or IP whois (ARIN, RIPE, etc.) headquarters location. I’d expect most decently sized providers will be in more than one country. Not sure this will work 100% of the time but I’d expect will be decently reliable. If there was a clear way on the page to show primary location/headquarters and alternative locations why they provide hosting.
Re your #2: I’ve found bgp.tools to be fairly reliable about AS owner information. Using that to go through your questions on HostHatch, AS63473 seems to be the only correctly associated AS and it’s headquarters is marked in Florida per their ARIN registration, which ARIN requires to be correct. Not sure why the others are listed the way they are as they seem incorrect per the AS lookup information. AS can change but it’s not simple or quick as ARIN (and I’d expect others are similar) requires providing validated/notarized/government issued company registration information.