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Back in 2001 Roberts insisted, in the midst of the technology industry's nuclear winter, that the Internet was growing faster then ever. He had a company selling gear at that time (presumably a different company than the one being promoted today), so that was a convenient prediction. Funny how this guy's visionary thinking always aligns with a business model for a company he's backing.

The only reason for no-net-neutrality being a threat in the US is the fact that there is no US public peering left.

My worst hosting experience was with featureprice.com - based out of florida, when I found them a number of years ago they had great deals and really cheap service, so I went with them. I had a ton of bandwidth and storage, and it cost me nearly nothing (about $125 per year).

But, they were a shady company; at one point my site went down entirely for a few days; no one in tech was available or picking up or responding to emails. About a week later I recieved an email titled "Explanation email". It detailed that apparently a water main had broke in a server room and destroyed the entire room - what kind of server room has a water main hanging above the units, I do not know. I lost all my data but was given two years free hosting. All of which did me no good when, six months or so later, Featureprice seemed to again lose all of its tech support at the same time that my site went totally dead. For about two weeks I was down, and had to redirect to another server I own. No phone support, just a chat with litterally ONE person handling all inquiries - as well there was a support ticket system, but good luck if that worked. What it amounted to was my finding out that FP had gone totally bankrupt, fired all of its crew and left its servers for dead. They said they were sold to Atlantic.net, but near as I could tell, that was all a sham as well. FP's CEO (whose name escapes me, we'll call them stupidhead) ran off with everyone's money, which was quite annoying because I had recently also paid for another year of hosting. I was told my money would be returned, but of course, it was not. I contacted the BBB and the attorney general, etc. all to no avail. Oh well. I'm with a better host now (godaddy) and much happier. If they were still around I'd warn everyone to stay away from them, but they're long dead now.

there's some more info here: http://www.carrierhotels.com/wiredspace/archives/0 00148.html

The industry has taken a two-pronged approach. Equipment vendors have been developing cabinets with built-in cooling, while design consultants try to reconfigure raised-floor data center space to circulate air more efficiently. The problem usually isn't cooling the air, but directing the cooled air through the cabinet properly.

There was an excellent discussion of this problem last year at Data Center World in Las Vegas. As enterprises finally start to consolidate servers and adopt blade serves (which were overhyped for years), many are finding their data centers simply aren't designed to handle the "hot spots" created by cabinets chock full of blades. Facilities with lower ceilings are particularly difficult to reconfigure. The additional cooling demand usually means higher raised floors, which leaves less space to properly recirculate the air above the cabinets. Some data center engineers refer to this as "irreversibility" - data center design problems that can't be corrected in the physical space available. This was less of an issue a few years back, when there was tons of decent quality data center space available for a song from bankrupt telcos and colo companies. But companies who built their own data centers just before blades became the rage are finding this a problem.

Save the poor server and use the less-bandwidth-print-version.
Thank you.

Not all ISP's peer for free with other ISP's. In a lot of cases, they have to "settle up" for their peering costs at the end of the month, per megabyte, with their peers. UUNet is big on doing this with their peers and it's where they make 50% of their income...

Cogent and AOL just had a fallout about this - Cogent felt that they should have free peering with AOL but AOL felt Cogent should pay for usage because most of the traffic going to AOL was for Cogent customers and not vice versa.

(see 'Peering' Dispute With AOL Slows Cogent Customer Access and Paid Peering )

So yes, the short answer is that upstream ISP's do pay per Mb in a good amount of instances if they aren't a huge transit hub. Obviously some ISP's aren't subject to this and just charge by the MB figuring the more traffic you're getting, the more money you're making from their connection.