I went to help friends set up their broadband service last night. They had looked at Which? magazine to get a rating for the various suppliers. They had chosen O2 for their ISP. The account had been set up, the equipment had arrived and the connection had been made. They had chosen O2 for their good ratings, but noted that it was also rated as the easiest setup. Being sceptical, at the best of times, and cynical the rest of the time, I wasn't expecting it to be that great.
I was wrong. The setup program asks simple questions and gives simple instructions. I only had to enter the password, and click 'Next' a few times. The connection to the ISP was set up without any further questions. Part way through the install Java found an update and asked to install it, so I knew it was working. Outlook Express was set up and was working - four e-mails confirming the account setup were ready and waiting.
Once it was all running I went back to the disc and installed the McAfee security software. I've had troubles with McAfee before in the registration process, but although it took longer than suggested it registered cleanly and updated itself and worked on the restart without complaining or asking permissions to do things.
Top marks to O2 for putting together a very good installation package.
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
File Space and Band Width Usage
The day before we went away, the Christ Church website (hosted by PlusNet) was taken down because it had exceeded its bandwidth allocation. It is a great unknown to me just what is out there on the web, trawling (crawling) around for the content of various websites. The excess wasn't spectacular, because it had been stopped, but had happened by 3am. If someone had tried to copy the site, and then someone else tried to do the same, that would account for it.
We post sermons on the site, and this may be one of the reasons that our bandwidth usage is increasing (the sign of a successful site). Certainly, there was a lot of interest from many places on the talk by Dr Salim Munayer from the Bethlehem Bible college, on the Holy Land.
I started the work necessary to restore the site. Log in was the first problem, it had been ages. The password I thought I remembered was not working, neither were the variants of it. I phoned support and told them I had needed the password. They went through several security questions, one of which is "What is the first and second letter of your password?" Luckily, I had the first two letters correctly remembered.
I had some work to do in the Church Office, so went there to do it. The site was still not back. We had been offline over 12 hours. I phoned Customer Services and asked about the possibilities of upgrades, and explained why I was asking. Where might our custom have to go if we can't get our site back? I made sure I sounded very unhappy. I talked about our users being unable to access the information they needed. I said that I thought a business service should be better managed. All this did the trick, the site was restored in minutes.
I am still fighting the system - trying to get support to respond; trying to get the information I need to manage the situation. The responses are slow and inaccurate so far. Webspace statistics only get updated when you do an upload, and then it may take 24 hours. Bandwidth Statistics are recorded and presented graphically, but access to some graphs is not available from our account on the portal.
PlusNet generally have a good reputation, but I notice that they are no longer in the top few ISPs since they were bought by BT.
Now I am looking at the alternatives. Especially as three days into the new accounting month, we are already approaching 25% of the month's allocation. We do not have money to burn, but will pay our way. So I started with the free file sharing services. The first failed at the sign-up process, the promised e-mail that I must respond to never came. The second one is FrostBytez. It's in America, but beggars can't be choosers. If it's all working, this URL should be a line drawing of the church building: http://upload.frostbytez.com/index.php/image/direct/FjJ48fZ2xQ/christ-church-orig.jpg
Try it and let me know if it doesn't work.
We post sermons on the site, and this may be one of the reasons that our bandwidth usage is increasing (the sign of a successful site). Certainly, there was a lot of interest from many places on the talk by Dr Salim Munayer from the Bethlehem Bible college, on the Holy Land.
I started the work necessary to restore the site. Log in was the first problem, it had been ages. The password I thought I remembered was not working, neither were the variants of it. I phoned support and told them I had needed the password. They went through several security questions, one of which is "What is the first and second letter of your password?" Luckily, I had the first two letters correctly remembered.
I had some work to do in the Church Office, so went there to do it. The site was still not back. We had been offline over 12 hours. I phoned Customer Services and asked about the possibilities of upgrades, and explained why I was asking. Where might our custom have to go if we can't get our site back? I made sure I sounded very unhappy. I talked about our users being unable to access the information they needed. I said that I thought a business service should be better managed. All this did the trick, the site was restored in minutes.
I am still fighting the system - trying to get support to respond; trying to get the information I need to manage the situation. The responses are slow and inaccurate so far. Webspace statistics only get updated when you do an upload, and then it may take 24 hours. Bandwidth Statistics are recorded and presented graphically, but access to some graphs is not available from our account on the portal.
PlusNet generally have a good reputation, but I notice that they are no longer in the top few ISPs since they were bought by BT.
Now I am looking at the alternatives. Especially as three days into the new accounting month, we are already approaching 25% of the month's allocation. We do not have money to burn, but will pay our way. So I started with the free file sharing services. The first failed at the sign-up process, the promised e-mail that I must respond to never came. The second one is FrostBytez. It's in America, but beggars can't be choosers. If it's all working, this URL should be a line drawing of the church building: http://upload.frostbytez.com/index.php/image/direct/FjJ48fZ2xQ/christ-church-orig.jpg
Try it and let me know if it doesn't work.
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