RE: [Sheflug] Domain names

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "David" == David Bottrill <david.bottrill [at] ntlworld.com> writes:

    David> My wife originally signed up for a domain with email and
    David> web forwarding with UK2 back in January, initially we found
    David> their registration process slow.  Once up and running we
    David> found their mail servers to be a little unreliable.
    David> However in recent months it seems to have got much better.

    David> To get around this she has now bought web space (50 MB)from
    David> UK2, it was available within a couple of hours after being
    David> requested and works well. The speed of their servers is
    David> exceptional, likewise the speed of FTPing the pages up.

No comment about UK2 in particular, since I know nothing about them.
It's quite possible they underestimated demand at first, reacted
quickly, and will always stay ahead of the game in the future.

But the immediate past is not necessarily an indicator of the future.

The question with these things is always "are they reactive or
proactive?"  I had my church on a server with GOL (Japan-only), which
is business-oriented and proactive.  They are always announcing
scheduled partial outages for upgrades, almost never have an
unscheduled outage, and except for the bottleneck at the backbone hub,
which is (of course :( ) badly regulated by the government, always
have better-than-advertised bandwidth.  What they don't have is a
local POP.

So instead of having two ISPs, one for the home page and one for the
connection, the church went with Bekkoame, a cheap national
alternative with a local POP and excellent (at that time) bandwidth.
Since then, Bekkoame has deteriorated rapidly as they continue to make
promises they can't keep and oversell their bandwidth.

GOL is one of the few ISPs selling to home users in Japan with that
kind of record; most, even the biggest, usually look more like
Bekkoame.  I don't know how to tell the difference, except to check
for those "unnecessary" outages for "premature" upgrades and
preventive maintenance.  I guess actually announcing what they are
doing to keep reliability and bandwidth up is another good sign.


-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.