[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[John L. Bass]

	> Most people stick by local providers like FRII, simply to avoid AOL,
	Quest, AT&T
	> and large corporate america ... and frequently accept a little less in
	services
	> for supporting the local little guys. Not all customers are willing to
	make this
	> service quality tradeoff - and shop strictly by the dollar.
	>
	Most?  Most people seem to be using AOL, MSN, and Earthlink.  Last time I
	checked, MSN and AOL were more expensive after the samples ran out and other
	than content spam, didn't offer much.

	FRII is a FULL access provider.  Shell, anonymous FTP, web space, e-mail,
	DNS mirroring, user configurable SPAM filtering for $20/month and then
	everything else for a little or a lot extra, depending on your needs.  If
	not having FP extensions is less, that's about it.  What am I missing?

Content and support are the number one sales assets for AOL, no other provider
comes close - but MSN is trying hard.

	FWIW, last time I checked calling AOL support might be likely to get a cube
	at Startek in Greeley.  I really liked it when Netcom customer support was
	here at Sykes and they didn't even have a local dial-pop.  Those providing
	support didn't even know how the service looked to the customers.  Low bid
	call centers are a bit lacking IMVHO.  FRII is still growing their 24/7
	support.

Yeah ... StarTek (which was Laramie based until 7/15) is one of a dozen contractors
for AOL. The contract provisions with AOL strictly mask the outsourced identity and
AOL has strict service requirements that must be uniformly adhered to by all
contractors to provide high quality phone support that is uniform across all the
contractors.

	Here's a real good one.  If you've moved a domain off Qwest to another host
	in the past 3-4 months, be sure to dig that domain at ns1.uswest.net and
	ns2.uswest.net.  Those DNS servers are not getting updated and are still
	showing erroneous A records months later.  Try getting Qwest support to fix
	that one.  Half of Qwest is still running on the uswest.net domain including
	a bunch of convoluted aliases that few seem able to fix.  Guess what bad MX
	records and relic aliases do to e-mail.  The Qwest DNS servers will show the
	right records, so expect their first response to be, "Our stuff is right,
	it's not our problem".

	BTW, can you connect to AOL and MSN on Linux??

	Sorry for getting so far off topic here.

	Frank

I haven't met a Linux/Unix geek that would want to ;)

John