I am considering an ISP swap - Demon are messing up their billing again.

My priorities are low hassle, high availability, decent support. Happy to
pay £25-30/month for quality service. I don't have a full picture of our
usage (no stats from Demon or our router), but have a reasonable idea; a
30Gb package should be enough.

On past recommendations, I'm looking at ADSL24 and IDNet. Headline price
has ADSL24 for £20 vs. IDNet for £25. The penalty charges for over-running
30Gb appear higher on ADSL24, but they also offer "offpeak" which could be
used to for moving big files.



Questions about IDNet:
- does IDNet have some sort of usage control system offering similar
customer data to that from ADSL24 ?
- the IDNet pages imply content from the BBC (iPlayer, etc) is "free"; does
this count towards usage limits ? (ie. its not really "free" in the way I
would think of it).



- Nigel

--
Nigel Cliffe,
Webmaster at http://www.2mm.org.uk/

Nigel Cliffe wrote:

For me they have been reliable , somewhat expensive, but with an
absolutely vanilla connectivity. No proxies, no shaping that I have
discovered, no requirement to use their DNS,..they will even accept
Email to their relay from just about any of the mail accounts, many not
registered with them, that I am part of. And a fixed IP address so I can
set up firewalls on remote sites I need to manage with a pretty high
degree of security.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Thank you for the reply.

I will consider, but seems expensive (30Gb is £35 at Clara vs. £25 or £20).
Given that both ADSL24 and IDNet have positive support reports here, I
wonder if I actually gain any real quality of service for the extra paid ?


All useful features, though think the other two are the same.

Could be useful, though I own three domains on different hosters with
(passworded) SMTP access, and have used them as relays when Demon had a
glitch last year.


Not required by me; single site installation.





- Nigel


--
Nigel Cliffe,
Webmaster at http://www.2mm.org.uk/

Nigel Cliffe wrote:

They provide daily download usage data. Is that what you meant ?


Not familiar with that bit.

If you want to move to IDnet, email me on the address in my headers and we'll
both benefit to the tune of £10. They're an excellent ISP.

Graham

Eeyore wrote:
That's enough.


Answer from IDNet is that "they don't charge for accessing BBC on demand
content unlike some other ISP's, but it does count towards monthly download
limit".

But, I'm not aware of any normal ISP charging for accessing the BBC's on
demand stuff (at least not yet!), so it seems to be a meaningless claim.
They did answer their email very quickly.


Thanks, though £10 is useful, its not a deal clinching amount. ADSL24 has
slight lead at present, though I am not making final decision today.


- Nigel




--
Nigel Cliffe,
Webmaster at http://www.2mm.org.uk/

IDNet are excellent. We had an outage and they really worked hard to
get BT to shift their arses and get our broadband back. When you phone
support (0800, not 0870) you get straight through to a human being who
will actually help you. Support line closed at weekends though.

Bandwidth allowance is helped by the fact that only download is
counted, not upload. No traffic shaping or throttling that I know of,
if you're into torrents. No newsgroup server though. A very good
support forum for users called Idnetters - check it out before you
decide.

CG

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 09:07:59 -0000, "Nigel Cliffe" <me@privacy.net>
wrote:
Overall I'm happy with adsl24 but there are issues with both the pop
and smtp email service.

New accounts go onto their new (since sept 2007) mailserver (saturn)
rather than the older one (pluto). It's been down rather a lot in
recent weeks but seems to be becoming more stable recently. Hopefully
the stability will continue.

Also, I get occasional false positive knock backs from the smtp server
refusing to send to/from? ip addresses supposedly blacklisted by
spamhaus.org

Not once has one of these knock backs turned out to be valid and it
can be quite annoying if the email is urgent and no backup smtp
facility is available. Fortunately, I have contingency plans for this
event.


Jim.

James Egan wrote:
Thanks for the contribution Jim;

email is critical for our home business use, so that might now swing things
to IDNet rather than ADSL24. Whilst we have backup mail paths (and backup
backup mail paths), its not something I like having to rely upon.



- Nigel


--
Nigel Cliffe,
Webmaster at http://www.2mm.org.uk/

In article <fqhep4$h5i$1@news.albasani.net>,
Nigel Cliffe <nxc653-news@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Why not run your email completely separate from your connectivity
ISP? There are several ISPs who specialise just in email (and DNS
hosting). All you then need is an Internet connection to connect to
collect your email via POP or IMAP, or have it delivered by SMTP,
depending on the setup.

And one thing I bash on about to people (mainly small businesses!) is
that if your Internet connection is critical to your business, then get
a business quality connection and be prepared to pay for it! You can get
an excellent service through Entanet resellers for £25 a month
(+vat), you can even pay a little more for enhanced care to guarantee a
3-hour response from BT and a 20-hour fix time...

However, you might want to see is adsl24 has their own email, etc.
servers or resell Entas - if they have their own and host outside the
'Enta cloud' then that might be the same as separating the connectivity
(which is really enta) and the hosting (adsl24).

Gordon

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 19:14:54 +0000 (UTC), Gordon Henderson
<gordon+usenet@drogon.net> wrote:

I was thinking about doing something similar myself.

My first ISP was U-Net and I was very happy with them until they got
taken over by ViaNet.

I noticed a while back that the old u-net team were back in the email
business.
http://www.simplymailsolutions.com/sms_nexgen.php


Jim.

Nigel Cliffe wrote:

Note that IDnet's mail server also lets through mail with @anything.anything as
the sender's address (as it should of course).

Graham

Gordon Henderson wrote:

IDnet IS primarily a business oriented ISP.

Graham

Gordon Henderson wrote:
We are separate. We only use the ISP for outbound SMTP (and could drop that
trivially), plus ISP admin/billing messages.

My company has a domain, with email and web hosting. Email platform has
POP3, IMAP and SMTP (and webmail). Inbound email is forked to backup
mailserver on a totally different provider (so if POP3 goes down between
mail arriving at ISP and us looking for it, we have alternative path).

In addition, we have a couple of hobby domains, with email hosting, on
different providers. We can use those for outbound if primary two fail.

And finally, we have an ancient dialup BTInternet PAYG dialup account, which
we keep alive by using once a month, as emergency backup if broadband is off
for a while, or we have to operate from somewhere without broadband.


Quite agree. Firstly we want a reliable quality connection. So if reliable
costs £35/mth, we will pay for it. But, if reliable can be had for £20/mth,
there is no point paying £35.



I thought ADSL24 was an Entanet reseller ??



- Nigel


--
Nigel Cliffe,
Webmaster at http://www.2mm.org.uk/

In article <fqj6qo$mdg$1$8302bc10@news.demon.co.uk>,
Nigel Cliffe <me@privacy.net> wrote:
Sounds intersting... Complicated handling multiple pop accounts, but if
it works for you then ...

I stopped providing (and advising my clients to use) backup MX records
some time back (years) They are targetted by spammers, as they can
often be a conduit for spam that might otherwise get directly rejected
at the primary MX host. Some mail handlers use backup MXs as deliberate
spamtraps too (eg. Messagelabs - woe-betide you if you ever are unable
to send email to a primary MX hosted via messagelabs, as if you hit
their backup's you'll get blacklisted)

Indeed...

I think I implied that further down - yes they are, so they ought to be
able to provide their £25 service. This is the one I persuade most of my
customers to take - the limits are generous enough for a small business -
45GB a month peak time, and 300GB off-peak, and up to 830Kb/sec upstream
speed too.

So with Enta resellers, you need to look into their "value-add" sort of
thing...

Gordon

mymail@hotmail.co.uk wrote:

Join the club ! They are a joy to be with.


I have been with NTL in the past for internet access. I had one of the
original free dial-up accounts and I can't fault them for that. I used
that for some years. Then many years back now I tried their 115kbps ?
entry level 'broadband'. It worked OK IIRC but I was peeved by the amount
of spam I received after a while to my @ntlworld.com inbox. When it
reached over 200 a day, even with Mailwasher it was a pain to deal with
and I cancelled, moving to FreeUK for dial-up again.

I returned to broadband with Plusnet and had no problems with them until
they cocked-up and transferred me to Tiscali LLU (without my knowledge).
They meant well .. it was an 8 Mbps service but a filter on my line that I
didn't know about meant I had regular disconnects etc and Plusnet were
utterly hopleless at dealing with it. They never did sort it out.

Luckily I discovered that IDnet accepted LLU MACs so I could get away from
Tiscali LLU without a penalty charge and I've been a huge fan of them
since. They called out BT as soon as it was clear I had a problem and the
line fault got fixed within 10 minutes of the Openreach guy arriving. The
problem with Plusnet/Tiscali was simply that they refused to call in BT to
sort it out, they thought they knew better !

Because Virgin were offering such a stunning deal on the 4 Mbps broadband,
I tried them again last April ( I already had a second phone line with
them and a cable connection) It was fine during offpeak periods but
dismal during the evening so generally no point in having it ! Sums it up
really.

With IDnet, you really do get about as fast a service as it's possible to
achieve over traditional copper wires in the UK (excepting ADSL2+ users of
course).

Graham

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 13:02:56 UTC, mymail@hotmail.co.uk wrote:

Yes, Ron.
--
[ 7'ism - a condition by which the sufferer experiences an inability
to give concise answers, express reasoned argument or opinion.
Usually accompanied by silly noises and gestures - incurable, early
euthanasia recommended. ]

On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:37:51 +0000, Eeyore
<rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:

But they don't have a news server

--
Peter Lawrence

Peter Lawrence wrote:

So ? That's absolutely NO basis on which to select an ISP. And indeed
it's far from unusual these days either, especially if you want
binaries.

Use astranews. It costs me a few tens of pence a month.

Graham

mymail@hotmail.co.uk wrote:

Not even all ISPs provide any news server at all.


Astranews, $10 (£5) for 25GB of non time-limited downloads. My initial
subscription should last me several YEARS.

Graham

On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:37:46 UTC, mymail@hotmail.co.uk wrote:

Good God, Ron. A xenophobe like you is paying someone in *Germany* for
your news!

I can understand that that is the reason why you manage to convert 10
euro to £12.00, mind.
--
[ 7'ism - a condition by which the sufferer experiences an inability
to give concise answers, express reasoned argument or opinion.
Usually accompanied by silly noises and gestures - incurable, early
euthanasia recommended. ]