A Port in the Storm for PSINet Customers?

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..."

Comments

A C-Net Perspective from 1997...

[AtariDatacenter]

In 1997, I wrote a Perspective article 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. 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

[cybermage]

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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