This is my first post with my new AT&T DSL service. I'm unimpressed, but at least it's working.

Problem 1: Getting the DSL set up will take a few days. In the meanwhile, we're jonesin for some internet. We were told that our account also got us access to AT&T wireless at places like Starbucks. Great! So off we go to a Starbucks and we try to log on. We find we lack suitable login information. We call up AT&T and learn that we need to have working DSL service before we can use the wireless. Lame.

Problem 2: More minor, but irritating. The documentation that came with the DSL modem repeatedly directs me to the AT&T website for help. If I had internet access, I wouldn't need help!

Problem 3: The default way to set up your DSL requires Microsoft Windows, and requires Internet Explorer. In a household where the only two computers are Mac OS X and Linux, this doesn't work really well. Fortunately I had a loaner laptop from work and used that.

Problem 4: The default set up system wants me to download and run software. I managed to set up internet access via Charter cable and TDS Telecom DSL without needing to install software, why does AT&T system require it?

Problem 5: The download fails. Repeatedly. I end up calling. On the up side, the guy on the phone is very helpful and walks me through an installation process that requires no downloads at all. It would have worked fine on our normal computers. (Indeed, I accidentally started using Firefox halfway through, and it didn't cause any problems.)

Problem 6: Giant terms of service. Gee, thanks. Make me agree to terms of service after you've shipped me crap. Also, I've got tech support on the phone, I'm running on laptop battery, my laptop is perched on my lap because the DSL modem is nowhere near a table. Like 99% of their users, I click agree without really looking at it. Contract law is America is a depressing joke.

Problem 7: The freebie DSL modem wants to call the built in wifi router 2WIRE924. How... memorable. And it wants to use a hard coded WEP key. 64 lousy bits. And the key uses a painfully obvious subset of the potential keyspace.

There were, happily two bright spots:

1: The freebie modem has 4 ethernet jacks and built in wifi.

2: Telephone tech support was pretty good, was easy to understand, and they answered the phone relatively late into the evening.

I previously mentioned that anyone offering "unlimited" bandwidth" is simply lying. I ran into another example and thought I should write a bit more about it.

Anyone offering absolutely unlimited bandwidth or disk with no strings attached is lying. They can't possibly offer it to you. If they claim they really can, let me know; I'd like to run a private mirror of the Internet Archive .

More likely if you dig deep into their terms and conditions you'll learn the truth: there is a limit, but they won't tell you what it is. There will be some wishywashy claim about being suitable for "small businesses" or some such. But the definition of "small business" is a secret. Hostpapa's example. Yahoo's example. If your site happens to become wildly popular because of some little amusing thing you posted, you could suddenly get shut down. You will receive no warning. You will not be able to plan for it. Good luck!

This is stupid beyond belief. Go with an honest company that will promise you concrete numbers. Monstrously huge numbers can still be very inexpensive, and you'll be able to plan for reality.

Overselling is just selling more of something than you have. In the case of web hosting, this typically means promising customers more disk space, or more bandwidth than you can actually provide. Most webhosting companies oversell. This is okay. Say their cheapest plan gives you 250 GB of bandwidth per month. It's such a cheap plan it's not worth selling smaller amounts. But since most personal web sites won't use anywhere near that, you can set your prices even lower, relying on the fact that most people will only use a small fraction of that. It done modestly, you'll never know they did it, but your price will be a bit cheaper.

Now, if your web host massively oversells, the price can be even lower. But your website will sometimes be slower. And if there is a burst of traffic on a different site on the same machine, your website might actually stop working for a little bit. Maybe that's okay, but you should decide to do it intentionally, not because your web host overcommited.

If your web host massively overselling? I can't give you a cut and dry answer. Even if I gave you an answer today, I can't tell you about the situation tomorrow. But I can give you some tools to help figure it out.

First, you need a rough idea what disk space and bandwidth costs. The current Amazon S3 prices are a pretty good baseline. You can get better deals (after all, there is profit in those prices) but S3 is quite reasonable. It's close enough.

At the moment, storage is "$0.15 per GB-Month" while bandwidth is as cheap as "$0.100 per GB."

Let's compare to LunarPages. LunarPages claims to offer "1,500 Gigs Storage" and "15,000 Gigs Data Transfer" for $4.95. We'll just crudely assume that the price only pays for the storage or the bandwidth. It's crude, but good enough for our purposes. So LunarPages is offering storage for $0.0033/GB and bandwidth for $0.00044/GB. LunarPages is selling for about 1/30th of the price of S3. That smells like excessive overselling to me. So long as the overwhelming number of their users only use about 1/30th of what they've been promise everything is okay, but more that and you might start hitting problems. Maybe it's okay, but I don't trust them.

How about Hurricane Electric? (I'm a satisfied customer, so I'm hardly unbiased.) $9.95 a month for 2 GB of storage and 125 GB of bandwidth. That's $4.975/GB for storage and $0.0796/GB for bandwidth. If they're overselling, it's just bandwidth, but only by small amount. That's good enough for me.

(Update later the same day:) I've put together a spreadsheet comparing hosts using this rule of thumb. I can't promise I'll update it, but if I happen to remember I'll try. Yellow cells indicate companies overselling by more more than 10 to 1 which I view as suspicious. Red indicates more than 20 to 1, which I consider outright fraudulent. In each case I've gone for the cheapest plan I could quickly find, but was only willing to commit to a single year up front. It's possible I overlooked some details, but I believe I picked reasonably representative plans. If anyone has recommendations for particularly major web hosts I should add, let me know.

(Later still:) Anyone offering "unlimited" bandwidth is simply lying. I would never buy from such a host. I won't add them to my table because the results are nonsense; they're infinitely overselling.

I've written variations on this post a number of times over the years when various friends and acquaintances have asked for recommendations for web hosting. Someone else has asked, so I figure I'll just post it publically so everyone can see it and I can just link to it in the future, saving myself some trouble.

I like Hurricane Electric (HE) for my web hosting and co-location needs.

In late 1999 I was looking for a web host and selected HE based on a friend's recommendation. I've been with them for almost 9 years now and have been happy the entire time.

For their cheapest option, basic web hosting, you get all the usual features of a web host. Email, PHP, Perl, MySQL, CGIs, and the like. A bit more unusually, you get a full Unix shell, which is handy. They don't offer Windows hosts, but running an internet service on Windows is like hammering in nails with an 8-track tape. It works, but why waste your time on it?

When you get a host, if you want you can stick with the given installation damn near forever. From memory, I was on Slackware for a long, long time before moving to a new host in exchange for more bandwidth at a lower price. They never forced me to upgrade to a new machine, but they offered me the opportunity if I wanted it.

They also are draconian about how they run their machines. This is a feature. To keep the costs down, you share a host with other web sites. This is how every low price web host works. (You can have a dedicated server, it just costs more.) So you're sharing a machine with other web sites. What if one of those websites is poorly written and hogs the CPU or otherwise monopolizes a scarce resource? HE has the murderd, a program that watches for hogs and kills them. If you have a well behaving website you'll never run into the murderd, and I'm glad it's there to keep the machine serving my site fast even when other sites are dumb. Similarly, HE configures their Linux system with levels of security I wasn't even aware was possible. I can't even see the process information for other users. If someone does something stupid like passing secret information via a command line, I can't see it. If someone finds an attack vector that relies on finding another program's PID, they can't use their account to find my PIDs. It's a small thing, but it helps improve the security.

What does all that draconian enforcement mean in practice? As far as I can remember, in 9 years I have never had any downtime. I've had friends who bounced between other web hosts running into problem after problem. HE has never failed me.

Now this service does cost a bit more. But not a lot more. $9.95 a month can run a monstrous website. My website got about 790,000 "hits" (individual requests) in the last 35 days. That's a measly 5 GB. $9.95 gets you 125 GB of bandwidth per month. (If you're planning on hosting lots of videos or images, you'll use more. Still, you can serve about 256,000 full size digital images off a consumer camera each month for that. And if it's a real problem, consider Flickr and YouTube.)

Now, you can find cheaper hosting. Part of what you're losing in customer service. You're less likely to get 24-hour support. If you do, the support is less likely to be skilled and able to promptly help. Remember those friends who bounced between hosts I mentioned? One had web sites down for days while their tech support flailed around trying to fix it. Also, many of these sites are wildly overselling their systems. That is, they may sell CPU time, or memory, or disk, or bandwidth on the theory that your average user will only use a fraction of what they're paying for. A small amount of overselling is a good idea; it keeps costs down and in practice it works fine. But it's most profitable if you oversell so much that the systems are running right at capacity. This means that your website is constantly be slightly slowed. If there is a surge in popularity for another site on the same machine, your site will suddenly get crushed. I don't know how aggressively HE oversells, but I've never witnessed any problems. Again, I've had friends whose web sites stopped working or became unusably slow when another site on the machine became popular.

Whenever I've dealt with HE, the customer service has been solid. They're professional, friendly, and reasonably prompt. I have no complaints. A friend actually co-locates several computers with HE (Yeah, they do that to.) and my friend seems happy with them. He's reported that their on-site tech support people are surprisingly game to help him debug hardware problems on his own systems over the phone. That is, his computer is in their location, so he asks them to examine the system, one he build and configured, and they'll do it.

A number of years ago I got sloppy and used more disk space than I was paying for. Technically I was on the hook for a hundred or so dollars according to the terms I agreed to. I contacted them an apologized. They assured me that it was okay. First, they said if I could get my disk space down within a day or two, they'd waive the charges this month. They didn't have to do this, but they did. They then pointed out that if I upgraded to a new machine, I'd get much, much more disk for free. (The upgrade was free. The only reason it isn't automatic is that with the new machine comes a new installation of Linux. It's possible that some web sites would not be compatible with. I had to do some very minor tweaks, but it was easy.)

I can't promise you'll have the same experience. Indeed, it's possible they've gone downhill. They're so reliable that I haven't spoken with them in over a year. But for now I trust them and recommend them.

After yet another crappy tech support incident with Charter, I jumped to TDS DSL. Tonight I called for tech support, the real test.

Since I got my DSL, I've been having erratic DNS problems. TDS's servers would either return errors or report that no such domain exists. Utter nonsense. Trying non-TDS servers would return what I expected. I called the first time it failed and got complaints about a distributed denial of service attack. Since the service started working as I was talking to the tech, I shrugged it off. However, it's still happening several weeks later, so I ring them up again.

The phone maze has me enter my phone number and agree that they can look up my records twice. The tech also asks for my phone number and ask if he can look up my records. A bit of a nuisance. However, I was talking to a real human being at 11:00 PM at night within a few minutes. I don't know where the tech was from, but he was easy to understand and he seemed to understand me just fine. At no point did he suggest rebooting. When I mentioned that I was doing lookups from the command line, he asked if I had run a traceroute. He quickly tested my complaint himself and reproduced it. Generally speaking, he was clueful and obviously not working from a script.

In the end the answer was "we're looking into it" and some confusing suggestion about TDS customers having problems with overseas sites. So I'm not entirely pleased. But I quickly got a clueful human being with whom I had no problems communicating. A decided step up from Charter. Hopefully the DNS resolves itself reasonably soon...

About a month or two I noticed that Charter broke DNS. Now, if host name doesn't exist, instead of getting a NXDOMAIN response, I get one of Charter's servers. If I'm using a web browser, I get redirected to this amazingly unhelpful web page. If I'm using some other service, I get a error message about connection refused instead of being told that the host name doesn't doesn't, making debugging problems very difficult. This is broken and stupid. So I complained, thus beginning a stream of idiocy.

My original complaint:

Alan:

I recently noticed that your DNS servers are incorrectly returning results for invalid domains. For example: host this-domain-does-not-exist-27101.com this-domain-does-not-exist-27101.com has address 64.158.56.56 this-domain-does-not-exist-27101.com has address 206.112.100.132 That is obviously wrong, as that domain doesn't exist at all. This causes problems as software that might have reported "That address does not exist" now report "Connection refused." For example, in my email client, if I normally get my email from highprogrammer.com, but I mistype it as highprogramme.com (missing the r), my email client reports that the connection was refused instead of the more helpful "Host not found." Please stop responding with inaccurate DNS responses. If domain does not exist, return a not found result, do not return the address of your own web server.

I think I've spelled out my problem here. So, here's Charter's response:

Charter:

textContent

That's the entire content of the email. Really. Turns out that their support system is busted and sends out broken email. It sends out multi-part email with both plain text and HTML versions, but the plain text version is busted. Great. Fortunately although my email client defaults to showing me the plain text version, I can ask for the HTML version. So here's Charter's first attempt to fix my problem.

Charter:

Dear Customer,

Thank you so much for contacting Charter Communications, my name is Dinah. I know how frustrating this could be for you not to log in to your e-mail account using your Outlook Express. However, I can certainly advise you as to how we can solve your problem regarding with you concern.

Please try to log in first using this link, [1]http://mail.charter.net, if ever the same problem will exist, please contact our High Speed Internet department at 1-888-438-2427 or initiate a chat session with us in live chat at [2]http://www.charter.com/ and local contact information that can be found at [3]http://www.charter.com/service/contact/contact.asp to retrieve this information.This allows for the greatest security and virtually eliminates the possibility that the information maybe intercepted. This way we can be certain that only authorized persons have access to your account information, including e-mail, web space and online account management services. However, if your problem is only with your Outlook Express, I would suggest to contact your Software Manufacturer for better assistance. But before doing that, kindly check you mail server settings if it it set to pop.charter.net and smtp.charter.net.

Thank you for your e-mail submission to our website! Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,
Dinah
Charter E-mail Support Team

Fail. See the part in my original message about Outlook Express? Of course not, because I never said anything about it. But apparently I made a mistake in giving an example. So let's try again:

Alan:

Your DNS servers are returning invalid responses. If my computer attempts to look up a domain or host that does not exist, the correct response from your DNS servers is "non-existant domain" (NXDOMAIN). Returning an IP address when none is registered is incorrect, non-standard behavior that complicates debugging a wide variety of problems. For example, charter-should-not-resolve-this-j48jd8.com and foobarquxzot912uj.google.com should return "non-existant domain" (NXDOMAIN) and nothing else. Instead, your DNS servers are returning 64.158.56.56 and 206.112.100.132 for both domains. (When I connect, I'm being assigned the Charter DNS servers 24.196.64.53, 68.115.71.53, and 24.159.193.40 by your DHCP server. All three DNS servers are exhibiting the behavior I am describing.) I believe this is an intentional configuration change Charter has made, and I wish it to be undone.

Right. No mention of email, just the core problem. Surely there is no way this can be misinterpreted.

Charter:

Thank you for your e-mail submitted via Charter.com. I appreciate the opportunity to serve you.

MY ACCOUNT PASSWORD RESET
If you have forgotten your e-mail password or it is not being accepted, due to security concerns, we cannot provide this information via e-mail. You may enter your primary e-mail address on the Charter.com [1]My Account page and a generic password will be sent to your e-mail address so that you may access and reset to a new password.

If you unable to remember your primary e-mail address, please [2]Chat Now or contact us at 1-888-438-2427.

CREATE MY ACCOUNT LOGIN AND PASSWORD
If you need to create a login and password on the Charter.com [3]My Account page, please use the account number located on the upper right of your Charter statement.

Charter Communications,
Your Corporate Customer Care Online Agent

Riiiiight.

Of course, ever the sucker for punishment, I helpfully reported the bug in their email system...

Charter:

I am sorry to hear that. Please contact our vas team at 1-888-438-2427 they will be able to help you with this.

Sigh.

Given the spotty internet service I've been getting from Charter, perhaps it's time to switch to DSL from TDS. It's a little slower, but if it's more reliable and comes with technical support that doesn't suck, it'll be worth it.

Update later that night: I asked again and got redirected to their phone line. I've been dreading this, because it means trying to communicate technical information over the phone. Sure enough, I spent an hour of the phone wasting my time. I spent about twenty minutes on the phone originally. The tech eventually realized she couldn't help me and tried to transfer me. The system failed to transfer me and directed me to hang up and call back in! I spent the next forty minutes telling the same tech over and over again what my problem was only to eventually be mysteriously disconnected. Despite my explaining that this was something happening on their end, and that it's probably intentional, if wrong, she kept trying to diagnose problems I didn't have. When it became clear that I was successfully on the internet, she was clearly flummoxed. It was also clear that she was working from scripts and was not a techie herself.

Happily, it only took a few minutes to sign up for DSL with TDS. We'll see if they're more clueful.