Can someone tell me where on the plusnet site I can find important info such
as monthly limits etc?? I've been on there for half an hour and can't seem
to find anything which makes me wonder if they're trying to hide something?!

From reading this group I was under the impression they're pretty good? Any
alternatives suggested? I'm looking at paying no more than £22 a month with
no set up fees for the highest monthly limit.

On 15 May 2005, Well_i_Wonder uttered the following:

It's uncapped right now, but they will take action on excessive users.
What that means is unclear.

I found them pretty reliable, though I've just migrated to UK Online LLU
product.

--
Be alert...the world needs more lerts

Phil Chung wrote:
Out of interest how are they, and how smooth was the migration ?


--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

On 15 May 2005, Mark Carver uttered the following:

For me it was a very smooth migration. I was activated on Thursday, a
day earlier than expected. My sync speeds are between 3.9Mbps and
4.2Mbps (currently 4.2Mbps). I'm experiencing a couple of disconnects
during the day (mainly in the middle of the night), but I've not really
noticed the disconnects at all. I'm still waiting for the free router.
That may hold sync better on my line (low SNR and 55dB attenuation) than
my aging D-Link router (dating from 2001). I've had about 460KB/sec
download from the link and the faster upload (512Kbps including
overheads) is very handy indeed.

--
Pluto Neptune Uranus Saturn Jupiter Mars Earth Venus Mercury Sun
. o o o O . . . . /\
^ \/
-- You are here

On 15 May 2005 18:19, "Well_i_Wonder" <dontuse@imaginary.com> wrote:

Three accounts, PAYG is the only one with fixed traffic quota. Broadband
Plus has no limit, but certain types of traffic (USENET / peer-to-peer to
be specific) get lower priority and Plus.Net recommends the Premier 21.99
account if you are a heavier user anyway. Without knowing what level of
traffic you are looking for it is difficult to know what's best...

If you use the connection at higher traffic levels at peak periods, as if
was a 5:1 to 1:1 connection, then you will probably asked to modify usage
or consider another ISP, on the Premier account. To reach 5:1 needs very
many GB a month - 40-50 GB which many would consider "high" should not be
a problem, and if using the connection heavily, overnight, should need no
concern from the user at all. No doubt there will be other ISPs defining
absolute limits, while Plus.Net staff have stated they haven't used fixed
limits so there is some flexibilty if they have to review usage on an a/c
(some might claim this is deliberately done to be able to change it later
but setting no specific limits seems clear enough to me as flexible... if
you want some ISP which has a limit and then either stops traffic, or put
your traffic throughput down to some lower level, blueleafinternet.com is
one which does this (21.99+VAT for the Broadband eXtra up to 2000 kbps).


--
Plus.Net <http://tinyurl.com/5jpa4>
I recommend them and save some cash.

With a guarantee allowing new users to migrate if they're unhappy!

On Sun, 15 May 2005 18:19:20 +0100, Well_i_Wonder in message
<news:d680ad$qjp$1@news7.svr.pol.co.uk> wrote:

Only the fact that they don't have any set monthly limits.

Which makes it hardly surprising they don't mention them :-)

Personally, I would much rather they did have fixed limits, than the
nebulous situation they actually hev.




--
Tolkien is hobbit-forming.
Alex Heney
Global Villager
To reply by email, my address is alexATheneyDOTPLUSDOTcom

On Sun, 15 May 2005 22:04:33 +0100, Alex Heney wrote:

Me to. Until the heavy user whiners forced the ditching of the fair use
policy, I was looking forward to an 8Mbps connection later in the year.
It takes a heavy month to come close to even half the proposed 30GB
usage and I live literally a stones throw from the exchange.

As far as I am concerned the whining heavy users maxing out their
connections who are sponging off the rest of us anyway have spoilt the
party for the vast majority of users who are well within the proposed
fair usage quotas.

JAB.

--
Jonathan A. Buzzard Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Northumberland, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 1661-832195

Well_i_Wonder wrote:
Although there is a usage limit since they axed the FUP they refuse to
tell you what that limit is or over what ime period.


Id avoid them. If you use any of their extra services such as
email,usenet,www hosting,cgi,anti-spam and so on expect frequent
outages. They get 5 or 6 failiures on the secondary services like this
per week. Support quality and service quality has dropped dramatically
since xmas.
The moving the goal posts unspecified cap is just the last straw.

"String" <String@BTInternet.com> wrote in message
news:4288a116$0$39094$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...
I beg to differ. Apart from a catastrophic failure of a CGI/FrontPage server
a few weeks ago which required all customers to upload their sites again,
I've had very good service from Force9 (aka PlusNet) over the past two
years. The phone lines are staffed by people who seem to be reasonably
knowledgeable and keen to help, unlike many ISPs. I'd certainly recommend
them to anyone who was looking for an ISP.

On Mon, 16 May 2005 15:45:43 +0100, "Martin Underwood" <me@privacy.net> wrote:

I would say you are very easy to please. IMHO any ISP that is unable to
restore a web site following the failure of their server is certainly no
recommendation to entice new customers to sign up to their service.

You also state that their staff "seem to be reasonable knowledgeable"; indeed
they generally are, but when the going really gets tough then they fail
miserably. They also have a history of making silly mistakes, indicating that
their back office proceedures leave a lot to be desired.

I fail to understand how your lurking in this Newsgroup could possibly give
you the impression that this ISP is pretty good. All the mailings that have
appeared here over the last year have had the opposite effect on me.

David Bradley

On Mon, 16 May 2005 14:33:10 +0100, String <String@BTInternet.com> wrote:

The "last straw" so you will be leaving Plus.Net ASAP, perhaps ?
If that is the case, it is not much surprise that the bulk of the post
was towards the negative on the service being given.

They are perhaps more 'open' about problems than some. A minority are
affected when it comes to CGI/web hosting (and I would recommend using
a dedicated hosting service anyway, unless one is parking some domains
at Plus.Net to use their 'free' webspace and e-mail facilities. As to
Anti-Spam/Anti-Virus I've not used those features, but have seen, from
time to time, situations where mail backlogs have happened on Plus.Net
(but to be fair, delays have happened on other ISPs too, and Demon had
massive delays on incoming mail that took ~ 2 months to sort out about
2 years ago. Plus.Net has had problems, perhaps because of the levels
of expansion they're going through... but their staff seem much better
at interacting with customers than many other ISPs (perhaps because PN
is not as big and impersonal as some of the others).

One of my main 'gripes' about Plus.Net, since they are providing users
of both residential and business with internet access, is that they do
sometimes fall short on giving notice of work - they have given some 3
days notice, this week of work on the ADSL service one morning, but in
the past I've seen as little as 6 hours notice, which, if one had some
backup going to a remote system, might be significant. Overall I'd be
more supportive of Plus.Net than several other ISPs I've used over the
past ten years (+ remember early 80s when there was an 'at risk' time,
of up to 3 hours, every week, on the JANET service!). Peter M.


--
Plus.Net <http://tinyurl.com/5jpa4>
I recommend them and save some cash.

With a guarantee allowing new users to migrate if they're unhappy!

On 16 May 2005 20:57, David Bradley <trolley@spamless.co.uk> wrote:

It happens, not just with an ISP, but commercial hosting services too. In
the 'real world' the customer is a fool if they have no backup copies of
their own, as well as any they might 'expect' to be made by firms they
use, whether paid extra to do so, or as part of the package offered.

Plus.Net, along with *many* hosting firms, make no such offer. Where the
hosting firms might take regular backups of customer sites, they might also
make a fixed charge per restore - $25 to $50 is not uncommon for someone to
type a username as a parameter to some background retrieval task, because
that's all it should take to do, assuming the backup is not corrupt :-)

Many newsgroups will collect primarily 'complaints' and checking almost any
open forum will find a mix of views, tending towards comments relating to
a situation where customer satisfaction has not been met - not always a
case of the customer having realistic expectations, of course, or even
putting into the public forum all the circumstances, which might alter a
situation and lead to acceptance that an ISP was 'in the right' all along.

I don't know which other ISPs offer as many 'extras' on their basic (ie
residential) accounts, but the more things they add, the more that can
go wrong. Some ISPs charge monthly fees or setup fees or admin fees to
do some of the 'included' things which Plus.Net offers. I have to point
out their services are sometimes less than robust, and would recommend a
business put money into using a separate hosting/mail service (that's not
just for personal gain, because I've offered them, but to give some better
level of independence from the ISP, in case of disputes over another part
of their service)... Similarly I'd say a business ought to consider the
use of a second phone line and ISP, if they consider their internet link
to be important (lots more options, of course, for businesses to consider
but costs don't need to be too high!). Anyway, for many people, Plus.Net
is just a value-for-money ISP, with some extras they might never use!

Peter M wrote:
Indeed having migrated to them and been very happy then seeing service
get worse and worse over the months along with the decline in the
quality of support plusnet is no longer a sensible isp for me to stay with.


They have more issues than other ISPs regarding these, im lucky in that
i dont use any of the extra services. If i did rely on email id be more
than a little annoyed with huge delays and downtime every single week.
Its not due to expansion, the staff seem less knowledgable than ever and
support for genuine issues is getting a joke.

My own personal fault, for a number of months ive been given an
incorrect subnet mask off their radius. After days of bullshit off
their support "it must be a windows problem" when ive already told them
its 3 routers and linux also doing it they eventually agreed they yes
they could replicate the fault but no they werent going to bother fixing
it. Thats an ISP support with a proven and reproducable problem
refusing to bother to fix it. Hardly a great advert.

Oh look, more core router issues tonight. Lets watch them boot another
30k users off for "load balancing" again later. Amazing really, they
load balance more than any other isp in history.

Service tickets issued in last week: 29. Total faults: 16. Not a great
advert. Thats several things a day they cant get to work.

Add that to the constant U-turns and outright lies about usage and
theyre rapidly becoming a joke. Ive gone from being very happy with
them to totally fed up by the standard of service they give.

Plusnet are extremely stable in terms of credit worthiness and they made a
very healthy profit acccording to the last accounts and credit rating, from
what i see its a pity they didnt use some of the cash to improve the service
and you just wouldnt believe the amount of some of the directors emoulients
compared to some of the bigger isp's around.
"String" <String@BTInternet.com> wrote in message
news:42890356$0$39081$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...

David Bradley wrote:

The servers that failed were the CGI and Frontpage servers. CGI servers
are by nature very dynamic. Taking a backup which could be restored for
all the different applications being run by all users would be very
difficult - there would be bound to be inconsistencies where sites were
backed up in the middle of transactions. Plusnet have accordingly
*always* said that the backups are the customers responsibility.

They could perhaps freeze the system for a couple of hours every night
to do a backup, or they could freeze updates on each account as it is
backed up, but I bet there would be a lot of people who would not want
their site frozen in that manner as they take care of their own backups.
I'm sure that this is a situation when whatever they chose to do,
significant numbers would be unhappy. Making it clear that it is the
users responsibility is therefore the safest course.

On the night it failed a scheduled maintenance was due to take place.
The cgi servers had been taken off-line and the storage remounted as
read-only to allow a full backup to be taken first. It was during this
backup that a total failure of the disk array occurred.

I was as p....d off as anyone having lost my forums and other stuff, but
I'm satisfied that in this case Plusnet had exercised "due care".

--
John

On Mon, 16 May 2005 21:18:46 +0100, Peter M <us-mail@rocketmail.com> wrote:

Peter, you are a regular contributor to this Newsgroup and from the quality,
range and depth of many of postings I would say that your knowledge of
Internet matters is far greater than mine. That said you have frequently
jumped to the defence of Plus Net when often an impartial observer would say
that you are really creating a smoke screen to obscure some real deep seated
issues with PlusNet and your opening paragraph, in response to an earlier
posting of mine, is a case in point.

Yes creators of web sites would indeed have a copy of their work on their own
machine since I doubt that anyone maintains a web site that is actually
'live'. However, I believe it is total unreasonable to expect end users to
upload a fresh copy of their site following the crash or replacement of a web
server. Yes, restoration may only be from backup tapes that might be a week
old, and therefore not containing revisions since then, but at least the bulk
of the site is recovered. Whatever the size of the site it will take time to
upload and it may not be convenient to the end user to carry out this task for
several times. Meanwhile error messages invade your email box about broken
web rings and exchange links, all of which will subsequently have to be reset,

I don't expect hosting agencies to make backup copies of web sites that they
host, I demand that it is done. If they don't, then my business is placed
elsewhere. To suggest that many hosting companies fail in this respect is
simply untrue.

Turning to the observations and comments that are made on Newsgroups about
ISPs and their "collection" by the providers for feedback undoubtedly gives a
lot of useful data. Sadly in many cases lasting damage to the reputation of a
company may have already taken place. For those requiring a Broadband service
there are many providers to consider and each will have its own business model
and tariffs which they feel gives an appropriate return on their investment.
It's a mix and match of services provided for a given fee, therefore every
provider will be unique.

What may be the best ISP for one user could well be the worst for another. I
have never the less created my own personal list of ISPs who are worthy of my
business and the clients that trust my judgement. PlusNet is not on that list
as a direct result of what has previously appeared on this Newsgroup about
them.

David Bradley

On 16 May 2005 23:31, David Bradley <trolley@spamless.co.uk> wrote:

While uploading repeatedly is far from desirable, those who can, will have
made the switch to broadband and therefore the task is simple enough, and
far from time consuming unless they have hundreds of MB of data (prior to
ADSL I have been involved in developing websites with upwards of 40,000
pages, uploading on ISDN, so with broadband I'd consider few would find
uploading difficult. From a business viewpoint, however, I've previously
indicated that I would recommend separation of 'hosting' from 'access' and
while Plus.Net has some good 'extras', there are alternative deals around
for those who have thriving sites, on other hosting services.

I'll have to differ on the last point. There has been discussion of late
concerning the takeover of a much liked and well-respected hosting firm,
which had several servers hit by external spam/other attacks in mid/late
April. It turned out the backups were partially corrupt and dated from
February - it was a cause of significant embarrassment for the new firm's
support staff [I was in chat for some 36 hours with different staff, a
few from the new firm, and the previous owner who 'stopped by' for part
of that weekend.

I've come across dozens of other services which make no claim about
backups. Some services I have used have control panel options allowing
customers to manually [and with cron jobs] make backups either onto the
server (!) or to remote FTP hosts, but on some even that control panel
option has been disabled. I am basing my comments on several years
checking the various services at lots of levels of cost, and can say
that 40-50% have not made mention of regular backups (whether charged
for or free) but clearly you have found a higher proportion which do
backups. I consider other aspects more important than backups. PGM

--
runbox.com - 1000 MB of mail storage and 100 MB for files...
30 day free trial... <http://web.vfm-deals.com/runbox/>

insecure. The admin seems utterly clueless. The CGI servers are
constantly backdoored by south american script kiddies who use them to
launch attacks or spam.

At one point last week it was running 3 backdoor processes and had been
sending mail for hours. The people doing it are even quite happy to
leave the logs and files in /tmp and /var/tmp to reuse again and again.
Unfortunately the absolutely useless security allows them to rm -rf at
will (funny really, thats seemingly the only fix the admin knows too).

Anyone that has access check out bd2.txt df.txt enivar.txt and other
files in /tmp and follow those through.
The system has more holes than swiss cheese. Its a liability.

"Well_i_Wonder" <dontuse@imaginary.com> wrote in message
news:d680ad$qjp$1@news7.svr.pol.co.uk...
Well I'm more confused than ever now!

Originally I thought I'd be happy with a capped service but then thinking of
being falsely accused of going over a limit or just the general hassle of
having to keep an eye on my internet use I decided to pay a bit extra and go
with uncapped, but this is really stretching my budget!

I want to make sure I'm getting the best deal, also my future is uncertain
so although plusnet's contract isn't entirely refundable I could at least
cancel it with only fairly small costs incurred, which is a benefit.

So in the opinion of you knowledgeable folk which is the best current,
reasonably priced, uncapped ISP?

*sigh* this must be what it's like to be a grown up? Making dull pointlessly
difficult decisions?

W.

On 17 May 2005 23:52 GMT, "Well_i_Wonder" wrote:

Have you *any* guess at what amount of traffic you expect to use ?
I ask because I see people on about "keeping an eye on it" (which
I'd understand for someone on an account with a 1 to 3 GB quota,
if only because an extra couple of hundred MB may mean paying for
another whole GB of traffic. If you expect to go into the 50+ GB
then you might consider some firm like Metronet, but if you aren't
then Plus.Net would still be fine. It's really the heavy users who
know they want 50 GB a week who won't be welcome (and not sure of
any ISPs who will want such customers, in the long term... Peter.


--
Plus.Net <http://tinyurl.com/5jpa4>
I recommend them and save some cash.

With a guarantee allowing new users to migrate if they're unhappy!