You don't own your network, and that's your real lock-in.

Moving your servers to a new host is a project. Moving your network off a host is a different animal: new IP space to warm up, mail reputation to rebuild, DNS to repoint everywhere, firewall allowlists at every partner who ever pinned your address. That lock-in never shows up as a line item, and it is why the network underneath your host matters more than the badge on their homepage.

The rented backbone

Here is the part of the hosting industry that does not make it into sales decks. Many hosts are tenants. They buy transit from an upstream carrier, rack servers behind it, and resell the connectivity as if it were theirs. The routing policy belongs to the upstream. The maintenance windows belong to the upstream.

When that upstream has a bad day, reprices, or changes policy, your host opens a ticket and waits in the same queue as everyone else. So do you, one level removed, with no visibility into any of it. The tell is simple, it is public, and it fits in one email.

What owning the AS buys you

Our network announces itself globally to the internet as AS200477 across our datacenters in Athens, Amsterdam, and Toronto, registered to us at RIPE. That one fact carries the whole argument, because everything an AS owner controls, we control: which carriers we buy transit from, how traffic enters and leaves, what gets rerouted when something degrades, and how fast any of that changes. We are multi-homed on multiple upstreams, including global Tier-1 transit and regional incumbents, and we peer at GR-IX and NetIX. No single provider is our ceiling, which means no single provider is yours.

The addresses are ours too. Your services ride IPv4 space held directly from RIPE, assigned to us, not rented from a carrier who can reclaim them. Your IP reputation, the thing your deliverability and your partners' allowlists actually depend on, lives in address space that does not change hands when you scale or when we renegotiate transit.

The egress trap, answered

The hyperscaler egress fee is a lock-in dressed as a line item: you pay to move your own data out, which puts a price on every future exit before you have planned one. We have written about the mechanics in the exit tax, so here is only the networking half of the answer. A host that resells transit by the gigabyte has to meter you, because their supplier meters them. A host that owns the pipes does not. There is no per-gigabyte line on our network because we buy transit on committed capacity from several carriers and peer at exchanges, so there is no per-gigabyte meter to pass on to you.

The doctrine at the core

The network is built the way the storage is built, and for the same reason. Cisco ASR 9000 at the Athens edge and Juniper MX204 in Amsterdam, feeding a Cisco Nexus 9000 EVPN/VXLAN fabric: a small, standardized set of platforms, run by the same engineers who answer your ticket. The hardware doctrine applies edge to spine: we deviate only when the job earns it.

Five questions to ask any host about their network

This list is designed to be forwarded to whoever you are evaluating, including us. The answers separate network operators from network tenants in one email.

If your host's network belongs to someone else, so does your exit. Ask the five questions, check the routing table, and when you want the answers walked through on a whiteboard, come meet the people who run the AS.