July 5th, 2001:

For the time being… if you need to reach me use the following email address:

unixgod at rocketmail dot com

My cable modem has been down for TWO days straight. The other half of my apartment complex is working just fine.

BBNow provides my cable modem service. They are a company that specializes in bringing BroadBand access to apartment communities and other areas that otherwise cannot get DSL or Cable Modem service. For this, I am grateful. However… what is the point of me paying $80+/mo for service when it is down most of the time. I could slightly accept it a bit more if they were having some sort of massive outage that was affecting all of their customers… but the problem here is merely my half of the apartment complex. According to their customer service reps, “things just need to be reset every now and then” and they “have an engineer on site as we speak”. If this is the case, why weren’t they reset yesterday, or earlier this morning, or this afternoon? Why has it taken this long to repair the problems? The onsite routers/equipment do close to nothing. They handle DHCP/routing services as well as modulation/de-modulation of the Cable Modem signal for no more than 100 customers. None of these activities require an incredible amount of data backup/retrieval. If something broke, replace it…. if something needs to be reconfigured, do it. It can’t take that long.

On another note… I am looking at moving my personal web/smtp/imap/mysql services from outside of my home and onto the servers of another company. Basically, I require ssh/apache/php4/mysql/ftp/imap/smtp. This is not an incredibly difficult setup, and doesn’t have to be truly incredible service, as it is only for my personal crap, the bowling team website, and my dad’s small family website.

I am looking at the following companies:

PHPWebHosting
DreamHost
CWIHosting

Anyone have any other suggestions?