[Nelug] Linux friendly ISPs

[Dougie Nisbet]

I was with uklinux for a long time and found them very good too. I 
especially liked the way that you got instant access to the weblogs. But 
this was pre-broadband and I ended up with using uklinx for my domain 
hosting and BT for my ISDN. Eventually I just wanted things 'tidier' and 
went to Plusnet. Plusnet are pretty good and bundle quite a few bits and 
pieces in the package that can be quite fun although I haven't got 
around to using them yet (e.g. mysql). I was on a business package with 
PN for a long time, at 30quid/month, and only in the last few months 
downgraded to 'Premier' which is their in-the-middle package. It's a bit 
of an overkill for what I need and I'm sure there's a better value for 
money one but it is straightforward. The Pay as You Go type accounts 
that are now appearing seem to be quite suitable and I might be better 
off with one of those as my upload/download bandwidth is not very high. 
The big problem for me about Plusnet is that it is run by a moron called 
Lee Strafford who was responsible for one of most clumsy and unethical 
purges of its customer base ever seen ( 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/02/01/plusnet_boots_1100_users). I was 
a low unmetered dial-up user at the time and one weekend the new 
Slackware distro was released, so on one weekend I downloaded it, and 
that was the weekend that PN decided to check 24/7 unmetered connections 
and decided these users were permanently connected and kick them off. 
They sent emails to the accounts they then terminated shortly after. So 
if you are a PN customer you have to go to sleep at night knowing that 
your money is contributing towards Lee Strafford's pension and, quite 
frankly, that's something I find hard to stomach.

So PN offer a pretty good value for money package, but they are largely 
ridiculed and mistrusted on the PN newsgroups as they have a tendency to 
change their Ts&Cs and AUP every five minutes. I'm with them for the 
time being because I'm too lazy to move and they are pretty reliable. 
And you get 250MB webspace which I quite like.

I take it you've had a look at http://www.ispreview.co.uk? That'd 
probably be my first port of call if I was thinking of changing. If I 
was just after a basic service I'd seriously consider waitrose as they 
sound quite good value and ethical, they give all their profits to 
charity and have an 0800 support line.

Dougie