A couple of potential gotcha's to watch out for when picking ISP packages. Some are ADSL vs. Cable issues, and others are dynamic vs. fixed IP addressing.
* with ADSL your distance to the CO matters. Further away, and you will probably not achieve the spec'd bandwidth. CO = Central Office, which is sort of a local distribution hub for your telco. It is the place where their DSL box sits, which is talking to your DSL box.
* Cable is not particularly sensitive to distance, however bandwidth is typically shared between you and your neighbors. So your actual bandwidth will vary with cable, too, but on a different dimension.
* Make sure Telus is not blocking port 25 on the package in question if you intend to run SMTP servers or clients, which have to connect to the outside of the Telus network..It seems that for most home style packages they are doing that now. I'm not sure, if for example for business packages with dynamic IP addresses they are still doing that. Shaw is not blocking port 25 (at least not yet), even for home packages.
* If you intend to run a mail server from your premises, running a static IP address is better for a business, since quite a number of ISP's including AOL, and even some large organizations block all incoming mail from dynamic IP addresses. It's still possible to run your own mail server on a dynamic IP address, but you may want to route your outbound traffic through an email server with a static address.
For higher bandwidth and high traffic allowances, as well as higher availability setups you may want to look seriously at using hosting services. There are some pro's and con's around that, too. But for under CAD 100/month you can get a dedicated X86 type Linux server in a proper data center with the usual high availability features in HVAC, power and network access.
So for high and fast traffic with moderate CPU and disk space needs, hosting can be more cost effective. But if you need more CPU cycles and/or large disk space, then self hosting becomes financially more attractive.
Regards, ...Niels
Kevin Anderson wrote:
No, but I have looked into Telus's highest speed adsl business option
which is 4mbit/1mbit. I'd be tempted to go with them as they don't seem
too concerned about how much data you move, whereas I've had to talk to
Shaw a few times in the past.
Geez, I've moved ALOT of data over Shaw's pipes, and I've never heard boo about it.
Kev.
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
