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Personal Servers And "Commercial" DSL?
Blue Dog Fever asks: "I've been helping a friend of mine look around for a DSL service provider. He doesn't need a lot of speed, but what he does need is the ability to place his own server on the DSL (in his case, it would be Web, e-mail, telnet, and maybe FTP). The only problem is, every DSL service provider we've looked at restricts the use of servers to their 'commercial' DSL offerings, which usually start at $120 a month and go up from there. What I'm wondering is if anybody knows of an ISP that lets people put up small servers for somebody that isn't interested in getting thousands of Web hits or huge amounts of e-mail traffic, but just wants to set up a small server for fun."
MegaPath has a distinction between personal and commercial accounts, however personal accounts can be used to run servers. You cannot use the server for commercial purposes however. That means no banner ads, e-commerce, etc...
Even when I had a personal account they were quite friendly helping me set up my domain name and the like...
-JF
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
The Road Runner cable modems here in Georgia were great for a while, but soon they started playing tricks with their routers. I'm not an expert when it comes to routing TCP/IP, but here's what I understand: blocking ports is easy (duh... that's what a firewall does), but there is also some way of giving bandwidth precedence as well.
I knew people that used to tele-commute from home because they could get just at much work done telnetting in from their house as they could working in the office. Then RR worked their voodoo on the routing and telnet got so slow that the servers would time them out before they could even log in. It seems the best bandwitdh is coming in... and it is mainly the web ports. Going back upstream is usually only about 100K if you're lucky. Downloading is still extremely fast, but anything back upstream is very limited.
The explanation that was given to the people that I work with was that certain RR customers were operating "illegal servers" in violation of the service contract. Instead of eliminating problem users and/or bandwidth hogs, they just set up the system so that all upstream traffic would be limited to certain speeds and rarely used services (such as FTP and telnet) would also have their bandwidth limited. Okay, my parents my not ever telnet or even know what FTP stands for, but what about someone like me? I guess I'll have to get a business DSL connection just to get decent service.