Start the new year with a new ISP

Fifteen years on the net have led me to expect little or nothing from my Internet Service Provider (ISP). I’ve gone through lots of them, usually for service outages or downright lying to me. Earlier this year, I asked my sysop son to recommend an inexpensive but competent ISP. He suggested DreamHost.

For less than $10/month, DreamHost gives me 200 gigabytes of storage (which increases 1 GB a week), 2 terabytes of bandwidth, unlimited MySQL servers, 3,000 email accounts, Ruby on Rails, Real and Quicktime media streaming, and full access to UNIX. By the way, this is the smallest package they offer!

Last week I deleted jaycross.com by accident. Poof! Gone. It’s as if my house had burned down or a good friend had died. Then it occurred to me to send a message to my ISP. “How much is this going to cost me?” I wondered. “Can you guys restore the site from backup?”

In short order, I received this reply:

Sure thing! I’ve just restored your /jaycross.com/ folder to a backup
from one hour ago. Just to let you know, we keep automatic snapshots (or
backups) of all your files! You can access them by manually changing the
directory into the hidden “.snapshot” folder set up within each of your
folders — for example, if you wanted to access the backups for this
folder: /home/YOURUSER/ …. Charlie

No fee. No begging. No implication that I had been a doofus. I wrote Charlie, “I just want to tell you that you guys are great!!!”

If you’re being hassled by your current ISP, you may want to try DreamHost.

[DISCLAIMER: DreamHost will lower my bill if you sign up with the above links or use the referral code KARMA99 when asked. You will also receive $10 off DreamHost's standard fee.]