🚀 go-pugleaf

John Davis (jrdavis@netcom.com) wrote:

: What a lot of people can't seem to understand is that keeping a major ISP
: up and running is no walk in the park.  

This is quite true. In Netcom's case or anyone else's. There's the phone
connections, security issues, and mounds of other stuff. I don't, never have
and never will fault Netcom for not being perfect.

: It takes a lot of hard work by
: some pretty savvy people to accomplish this.  Netcom actually does a fairly
: good job.  Their major failing is user communications, they just don't
: seem to know how to do that.  Be that as it may, if internet access is
: vital to your life it is best to have at least one good fallback account

The reason I absolutely refuse to recommend Netcom to anyone is because
of the reason they have a lot of their problems. A couple years ago, they
decided to go nationwide and opened up POPs all over the place, at much 
too fast a rate for them to be able to do it right. To me this reeks of
profiteering (getting to the market before others do and trying to grab
market share, at the expense of connection quality). Plus, I have had
experiences with clueless sales staff, and many people have had experience
with clueless support staff.

: and to keep complete backups for your important stuff on your local
: computer or, if you use shell access, at least on both accounts.  If
: access isn't vital, then learn to take an occasional hit with a little
: grace.  You should still keep the backups in any case. 

This is true about stuff on your local computer too... I lost some data
off a hard drive that crashed, and I paid $200 to recover it -- I was lucky
that (a) they were ABLE to, and (b) they were willing to cut me a deal. 
Usually hard drive recovery runs between $500-2000 per job.


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