Building a Resilient Network: Our Journey with AS210622

When we decided to operate our own autonomous system, we knew it wouldn't be easy. But owning your network gives you a level of control that's impossible to achieve any other way.

Why We Got Our Own ASN

Most hosting companies rely entirely on upstream providers for their connectivity. While that works for many use cases, we wanted more control over:

• Routing decisions — We can optimize traffic paths for our customers
• Redundancy — Multiple independent upstreams mean no single point of failure
• Peering — Direct connections to other networks reduce latency and cost
• IP space — Our own PI space means we're not dependent on any single provider

Our Transit Stack

We are multi-homed across three independent providers, so no single upstream can take us offline:

Transit Providers:
├── Digi Romania / RCS & RDS (AS8708)  — 10G, primary
├── NAV Communications (AS6718)        — 1G
└── ParadoxNetworks / PDXnet (AS52025) — 1G

That is 12 Gbps of committed transit — modest, and deliberately so. We would rather run three well-understood sessions we can actually reason about than advertise a number we cannot back up. Everything above is visible on bgp.tools; we would encourage you to check any operator's claims there before believing them, including ours.

IXP Connectivity

Internet Exchange Points are where the economics get interesting: peering directly with other networks cuts latency and transit cost at the same time.

We are not there yet. AS210622 is transit-only today — no physical IX port. It is the next thing we want to fix, and it is the honest answer to a question we get asked a lot. If you would like to peer with us once we are on-net at an exchange, tell us which one and it will factor into where we go first.

BGP Configuration Best Practices

Here are some key practices we follow:

RPKI Validation

We validate all routes using RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure). This prevents route hijacking and ensures the integrity of our routing table.

Prefix Filtering

We maintain strict prefix filters based on IRR data. Every prefix we accept is verified against RIPE's IRR database.

Graceful Restart

All our BGP sessions are configured with graceful restart to minimize the impact of router maintenance.

Monitoring

We monitor our network using a combination of:

• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics
• sFlow for traffic analysis
• RIPE Atlas for external measurement
• Custom BGP monitors for route leak detection

Lessons Learned

1. Start simple — Don't try to peer with everyone on day one
2. Document everything — Your future self will thank you
3. Monitor relentlessly — You can't fix what you can't see
4. Build relationships — The networking community is small and collaborative
5. Automate — Manual BGP configuration doesn't scale

What's Next

We're continuing to expand our network presence and are actively looking for peering partners. If you're interested in peering with AS210622, check out our network page or reach out at peering@kicked.ro.