Summary

  • The RIPE as-set AS209874:AS-Upstreams, maintained by the operator's own novacloud-mnt, lists exactly three upstreams: AS49581 (Ferdinand Zink trading as Tube-Hosting), AS203446 (SMARTNET LIMITED) and AS215787 (TELE90 Telecom GmbH) [https://rtsak.com/en/as-macros/AS209874:AS-UPSTREAMS].
  • bgp.tools observes the same three ASNs in the live routing table, with 9 peers and 6 downstreams, originating 22 IPv4 and 16 IPv6 prefixes [https://bgp.tools/as/209874].
  • The operator's own IP-transit page instead claims seven Tier-1 upstreams (Cogent, NTT, Orange, Zayo, Equinix, Liberty Global, INTERKVM) and "Over 1000 Peerings" [https://novacloud-hosting.com/ip-transit] — a list in which not one ASN appears in the registry-defined set or in observed routing.

NovaCloud-Hosting is the hosting brand of Tech Tide Portugal Unipessoal LDA, the operator of autonomous system AS209874. Prior BTW coverage has mapped its routing footprint, its split registry administration across two RIPE organisations and three maintainers, the contradictory status pages around the 19-day Frankfurt FFM2 outage of July 2026, and the gap between its commercial storefront and its Portuguese registration.

What none of that reporting reconstructed is the dependency structure itself: who actually carries AS209874's traffic toward the rest of the internet, and what that structure means for the customers who buy transit, hosting and IP services from it.

What the registry says

The strongest single artifact is the RIPE as-set AS209874:AS-Upstreams, created 2025-05-17 and last modified 2026-02-26, maintained by novacloud-mnt — the operator's own maintainer object. It lists exactly three members [https://rtsak.com/en/as-macros/AS209874:AS-UPSTREAMS], a composition cross-checked against the bgp.tools rendering of the object the bgp.tools as-set view:

Member Operator IPv4 prefixes IPv6 prefixes
AS49581 Ferdinand Zink trading as Tube-Hosting 47 12
AS203446 SMARTNET LIMITED 21 5
AS215787 TELE90 Telecom GmbH 10 8

Aggregated, the set spans 78 IPv4 and 25 IPv6 prefixes. The operator itself maintains this list, and the RIPE aut-num AS209874 (as-name TECHTIDE, org ORG-MWUL2-RIPE, sponsoring-org ORG-SL1164-RIPE) imports from it and exports its downstream set to AS203446 [https://rtsak.com/en/as-macros/AS209874:AS-UPSTREAMS]. This is not a third-party guess; it is the operator's own declaration of who feeds it transit.

What the routing table says

bgp.tools' live view independently agrees: it observes AS203446, AS49581 and AS215787 as the three upstreams, with 9 peers and 6 downstreams, and 22 IPv4 plus 16 IPv6 prefixes originated [https://bgp.tools/as/209874]. The convergence of a registry declaration and an independent routing observation is the strongest available confirmation of the operator's real dependency structure.

What the operator's own pages say

Here the record diverges sharply. The operator's IP-transit marketing page [https://novacloud-hosting.com/ip-transit] lists seven upstreams — AS174 Cogent, AS6204 INTERKVM HOST SRL, AS6830 Liberty Global, AS2914 NTT, AS5511 Orange, AS6461 Zayo and AS15830 Equinix — and claims "Over 1000 Peerings," advertising Equinix FR5 in Frankfurt. None of those seven ASNs appears in AS209874:AS-Upstreams, and none is observed as an upstream in the routing table. A separate ASN microsite, as209874.net [https://as209874.net/], names a third combination: AS62403 PletX GmbH, AS49581 Ferdinand Zink and AS48314 IP-Projects GmbH & Co. KG, with two datacenters (Frankfurt NTT FRA1 and Eygelshoven SkyLink).

Hurricane Electric's BGP toolkit [https://bgp.he.net/AS209874] reports an adjacency set of AS49581, AS62403 and AS48314 — sharing only AS49581 with the registry-defined set — and ipregistry.co, whose data is dated 2026-02-26 [https://ipregistry.co/AS209874], reproduces the same trio while stating that AS209874 "does not have any direct peering agreements" and reaches the internet only through transit. That statement directly contradicts both the "Over 1000 Peerings" marketing claim and bgp.tools' count of 9 peers.

Three layers that are not transit

Two further organisations appear in AS209874's record but do not carry its traffic. GHOSTnet GmbH (AS12586) is not in the upstream as-set, yet its RIPE account de.ghostnet holds several /24s originated by AS209874 — including 5.83.150.0/24, 5.175.137.0/24 and 5.175.174.0/24 described as NovaCloudHosting, and 5.175.187.0/24 described as GHOSTnet [https://bgp.tools/rir-owner/de.ghostnet]. A RIPE whois record for 5.175.237.0/24 shows netname GHOSTNET-FRA, descr GHOSTNET GmbH, status ASSIGNED PA, mnt-by GHOSTNET-MNT, created 2025-08-23 [https://whois.ipip.net/AS209874/5.175.237.0/24]. GHOSTnet is the registry-level holder of address space the operator announces — a landlord, not a transit provider.

Scaleblade, Ltd. (AS52041, org ORG-SL1164-RIPE, mnt SBL-MNT) is likewise not an upstream; it is the sponsoring organisation that shares ORG-SL1164-RIPE with AS209874 and accounts for the SBL-MNT maintainer and a "Scaleblade NOC" description on an announced /48 [https://iptrace.net/en/as/52041]. Registry sponsorship and routed transit are different layers, and this operator's record keeps them in different hands.

What a customer actually depends on

For a buyer of NovaCloud-Hosting connectivity, the composite picture is this: real transit arrives through three small European hosts and resellers — a sole-trader host (Tube-Hosting), a small UK operator (SMARTNET) and a small German telecom (TELE90) — each with its own upstream fragility. The Tier-1 names on the marketing page are not in the dependency chain that the operator itself declares and that the routing table confirms. Prior BTW coverage documented that the announced-versus-routed discrepancy exists [https://btw.media/en/novacloud-hosting-announced-versus-routed]; this reconstruction shows its size: three real upstreams versus three mutually incompatible self-published lists, zero overlap between the flagship marketing list and observed reality. One verification limit remains: the primary RIPE query page was not fetched directly in this investigation, with registry text read through third-party mirrors the RIPE query page.