When I ditched Digex for being increasingly indifferent to their lowly non-business dialup customers, I went looking for a kinder, gentler ISP. I wanted great customer service, low prices, no busy signals, AND (the kicker) a UNIX shell account. And after much researching, I thought I'd found what I wanted in Novanetwork. No busy signals, very fast connections, and my shell account-- and though the customer service left a little to be desired in that the lone sysadmin was the only guy who seemed to have any clue as to what was going on in them humming plastic boxes, I was content, in that things worked great almost all the time.

Things were mostly wonderful then, for over a year. I complained a few times about the embarrassing ineptness of the folks they had answering the customer service phones at the main office, and I complained about the unanswered phones at the "24-7" tech support service they had contracted out, and I complained about the total lack of notice users were given when there were system changes or planned network outages, but I was okay with most of it. Until... November of 1999.

They did an OS upgrade, and my account got completely erased. Everything. Vanished. All my email, my files, EVERYTHING. So, I called up, explained what happened, and asked if they could please go to the backup and restore my files? Sure, no problem. And then nothing happened for a very long time.

After three months of calls and emails, and of troubleshooting /their/ system operations over the phone (and I'm no UNIX guru) I was finally told the bottom line: I was never going to get my files back. The backups hadn't backed up my files, not once, ever.

Meanwhile, they'd changed a bunch of things around in their services, which necessitated settings changes on one's home network software. They didn't send out any email describing the changes; instead they just sort of waited until your system didn't work any more, you waited for a while to see if it was another system problem that would heal itself, got disgusted, called them, and then they'd tell you how to fix it. That's sort of emblematic of the way things are managed there, I think.

And by fall of 1999, even when we got our settings corrected and were supposed to be able to dialup, about half the time all we got were busy signals or a connection so slow it would have been quicker to walk to the server and deliver the bits by hand.

The really sad part is that it's a family run business, and all the people there are extremely nice (so much so that I always felt guilty for complaining) and I'm all for giving small businesses a good crack at giving huge faceless corporations competition, but in this case, smaller does not mean better, at least not till they get another sysadmin or two.

So I guess here's the bottom line: if you want to pay as much (or more) as you would elsewhere for an ISP service that is totally unsupported by competent staff and is painfully slow, if you can connect at all, go for it! You also might want to give the Marquis de Sade a call. Me? I'm now a very happy cog in the Mindspring machine.



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