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The Internet

A Port in the Storm for PSINet Customers? 19

Posted by Cliff from the finding-a-new-provider dept.
EdA asks: "My wife's small non-technology company uses PSINet, who are going belly up. Where is a safe haven? They don't have much in the way of requirements: domain hosting; a small (static) site; about 20 mailboxes and unlimited dial-up. How can I check the health of potential ISP's, last summer we were investigating moving her company to DSL and now everyone we talked with is out of business already! Here's an interesting tidbit: PSInet's website is now inaccessible..."
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A Port in the Storm for PSINet Customers? More

A Port in the Storm for PSINet Customers?

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  • Re:Cingular vs. Plural (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All your base are belong to us?

  • I found this quote on my company's US website:

    Inter.net was created by joining together all of PSINet's consumer Internet and portal businesses and is the only global consumer Internet Service Provider. While PSINet will retain a minority ownership position in Inter.net Global, there will be no future financial obligation to Inter.net Global and no seats on the Board of Directors.

    The whole link is here [inter.net].

    I guess this means that all former small business subscribers to PSInet may actually get folded to Inter.Net. Since I work for the Philippine subsidiary, I have no idea how this might work in the US or if this might actually happen.

  • Head over to www.webhostingtalk.com [webhostingtalk.com] and post your question there. I am sure you will get some good input.
  • The saying is "jack of all trades..." which has the advantage of making sense.

    Hmmm... I knew that. Wonder why I typed the wrong word...Must be tired. Thanks.



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  • Like the subject says, I don't know, but their website works for me.
  • while i certainly would not invest in PSInet now, I think they will remain viable.

    They will file for bankrupcy, and re-emerge. Service will be uninterupted. Or, they will be broken up and sold off. In which case, you may end up in the same place.

    I'd just watch and wait.

  • Don't worry about PSI Net. No matter what, someone is going to be taking care of things. But if your company is small, I would advise hitting a site like www.halfpricehosting.com or somewhere else. Half Price has been great for me, and I have been through Dellhost, didn't work out, up time was like 75%... hph has been 95% at LEAST.
  • There is a saying, "Jack of all traits, master of none."

    The saying is "jack of all trades..." which has the advantage of making sense.

    We now return you to your on-topic discussion already in progress.

  • My wife's company is something something...

    Anyway, piggyback providers are doomed to fail. Go with a company that has to exist for the line to exist at all. For me, that's Verizon (bet you didn't think Verizon was available at the North Pole). For you, it may be someone else.

    Dancin Santa
  • My bad.

    PSINet, who is blah blah...

    Dancin Santa
  • I come from a different perspective and share the same conclusion... suggesting that we are both right on the mark. In 1996/7 I was a sysadmin/developer at one of those small ISPs, and as the industry grew up and started to go absolutely insane, it was clear that the big folks were trying too hard in some areas, not trying hard enough in other areas, and were generally clueless. The local folks did everything better except marketing.

    Four years later, and the local folks who knew what they were doing back then GREW and became REGIONAL. Some other local folks died natural deaths or were sucked into Verio and other such providers who tried to grow through roll-ups.

    So the best of the best are the moderate regionals who have survived. If they have been heavily invested in DSL, they might be pretty downtrodden right now, but they are still the go-to people with clues a-plenty, with the bonus that they actually answer their phones.

    (As for me, I left the ISP in 1997, tried to create a web development company and failed, and am left doing managed hosting and co-location out of my house. But we were talking about you, not me.)

  • Is "Plural" the latest name change for some telcom or telco or did you mean "singular"?
  • The company I used to work for used PSINet as our ISP (via a 56k leased line; we hosted our own Web and Email) until 1996. I was always very happy with them in those days... they even did a great job handling my fumbling newbie requests for packet filtering changes on the router. After we left them (for PHB-type reasons), I heard through the grapevine that they had grown more quickly than they could handle, and service had really slipped. Now, they're fading to black. A shame, really....

    Colleen M., if you should see this, you were great. Be well.
  • It looks to me like you may actually be asking two questions, not just one: That is, how to get *connected* to the net, and how to have a *presence* on the net. You may be best served by using separate providers for each of these.

    In general, I'd recommend ditching dial-up if you really want to use the Internet as a serious tool. That means check into cable and DSL services in your area. These usually include at least some minimal ISP services: a few mailboxes and maybe a personal web page of some kind. Depending on your needs, this could be all you need, but since it looks like there's a business presence needed here, the bundled stuff probably won't cut it.

    In that case, you'll need a hosting provider for web and mail as well. There are many of these, and quality and service vary tremendously, but one that I've found to be cheap, reliable, and professional is burlee.com [burlee.com]. I have no relationship with them other than as a satified customer. They still can't do *everything* I want (they don't offer Zope hosting, for instance), but they do have a very nice offering of you choice of Linux or NT servers and web environments (IIS/ASP or Apache/PHP), and competent(!) tech support. Thier prices are very reasonable as well - so reasonable that this wound up being cheaper (not to mention easier) for one of my recent domains than even hanging an Linux box off a T1 volunteered by a friend.

    HTH

  • Good advice. Here's a few specific recommendations I've heard: csoft.net [csoft.net] for good and inexpensive web/email/ftp hosting, and register.com (if you want to switch registrars for your domains or make new ones) as they provide free primary and secondary DNS. The ZoneEdit place sounds cool too if have pre-extant domains through NSI.


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    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
  • Personally, I'd recommend *against* Verizon. They don't have a friggin clue when it comes to most internet stuff. I spose they may be able to handle dialup pretty well, but just ask some of the poor folks in the World Trade Center who are stuck in the middle of Bell Atl... uh, I mean Verizon's monopoly and they'll tell a different story. Verizon blames so and so (eg, UUNet, if you have an ISDN line)... so and so blames Verizon. In the end, you're just stuck. When I worked there, the company next door to me had no net access for weeks on end cuz Verizon didn't know their ass from their elbow.

    That said, I'd suggest you consider splitting up net access and web/email hosting. For hosting, go with a company recommened by other folks. Pop online and check them out a bit. Watch out, though... some of the biggest companies have the worst support and technical expertise (example: Interland). For dialup, go with a regular ISP... like Earthlink or something along those lines. Or, even better, a local one. You don't have to worry as much about switching ISPs... since your email is hosted with your website by someone else.

    Best advise I can add to that is... consider using someone entirely different for your DNS services (perhaps Zone Edit [zoneedit.com]). That way, if you do switch web hosts, you control when the switch is made. It makes switching hosts almost painless.
  • > PSINet, who is blah blah...

    Not if you grew up in the UK; the King's English (or is that the Queen's English?) sometimes uses plurality when discussing companies, e.g. "Microsoft are planning world domination." Don't ask me why, though; I guess they see a company as a group of people, and use the corresponding indicative. Oddly enough, this is only the case some of the time; for example you'd never hear "America Online are an ISP" but you might hear "America Online are launching a new service this week." Are seems to be used primarily in conjunction with verbs, and is is used with most other objects.

    That are the end of this off-topic post :)

    Shaun

  • A C-Net Perspective from 1997... (Score:3)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday April 23, 2001 @09:53PM (#270136)
    In 1997, I wrote a Perspective article [cnet.com] for C-Net. Particularly, quoting from a Forrester research article, "These ISPs are now facing a shakeout that could lead to a consolidation of up to 90 percent of all of today's ISP businesses over the next five years, the research firm predicts. And guess who's going to get it? It's not the little guys. "

    This was in response from another article in 1997 predicting a majory industry consolidation [cnet.com]. The small ISPs were going to be gobbled up, they claimed. Well, there was a bit of truth of both sides.

    What do I recommend? Go with a regional ISP of moderate size. They're not going to have a silly dot-com based business model (let's grab market share and throw money to the wind) and they're not going to be small enough to run themselves into the ground (how do we run a business, again?). The price will probably be on-par, and you stand a better chance of getting better service.

  • Look For Diversity Of Income Sources (Score:3)

    by cybermage ( 112274 ) on Monday April 23, 2001 @10:51PM (#270137) Homepage Journal
    My condolences for your trouble. As a former PSINet employee, I wish I could have emailed people and warned them this was coming. I knew it was inevitable when I left in late '98. Cashed out before my options were worthless.

    I've worked for various Internet providers in a variety of capacities right up to VP. The nature of the business has changed and I'd recommend you adapt to it.

    PSINet was operating under the assumption that you could make a profit by distributing a commodity product, working to lower their costs by stock-piling inventory. I could go into details, but that's kinda off topic.

    Here's my advice. Find a provider that gets it's income from more than one thing. Cable providers, for example, get substantial income from programming and can cheaply deliver service over the same facility (fiber and coax wire in this case.) Local telephone companies (avoid CLECs) get their income from voice service and also own the wires.

    Another advantage of cable and telephone companies is a single point of blame. If your Internet service is down, it's their fault, period. Whether or not it's true, many ISPs waste a lot of time blaming outages on the people providing their cables.

    As suggested by another poster, don't put all your eggs in one basket. There is a saying, "Jack of all traits, master of none." Don't rely on your ISP to handle your website and email. It is a rare exception to find an Internet provider that actually understands both Access and Servers well enough to do both well. Find a hosting provider that will take your security seriously.

    Seperate providers for each service will cost you more, most likely. But it'll be worth it.

    One more thing. When choosing a provider, make sure that their backbone connection isn't PSINet. There are many providers out there (e.g., Earthlink) that depend heavily on PSINet.

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