I know we’ve done this before, but these days companies go bad so often, I wondered what the current situation was.
So who is out there that provides either free (presumably ad-laden) or under $10/month ISP service?
Are they fast?
Are they reliable?
Can they be used between 7:00 PM and 10:00 PM?
Do they sell your name to the whole world?
Do they have a URL? j/k
Hosting web pages and other add-ons are nice, but I’m really just looking at outfits that let you connect to the web and serve e-mail.
I see that you live in NE Ohio. I live in Central Ohio and use http://www.qn.net it is reliable and costs $189 for a full year and unlimited use and a little webspace. I know they have expanded their area a lot so they may be available up there. http://www.bluelight.com is good for a free service.
Freewwweb is dynamite. They have about 6 local dial up numbers in my area and require no downloads. Just sign up and create a dial-up applet and you’re good to go. It’s free and there are NO pop-up ads or time-outs or any other catches with one exception: Their email server disallows mass mailing- you can’t have more than ten recipients in your To: and CC: fields. Most people shoudln’t be bothered by that unless they are professional spammers or use the mail account for business (I am the prez. of my condo association and therefore can’t use my freewwweb account to transact business related to the condo cuz there are always more than ten recipients. No sweat, I use Hotmail in such cases). Freewwweb doesn’t offer free 24/7 tech support, so you may at some point need to know some basic troubleshooting or know somebody who can help out in a pinch.
I also have Netzero, but only have to use it once every two months or so when Freewwweb is doing maintenance.
If you must have web space and don’t like Geocities, you’ll need to pay for an ISP. Still, there are at least two excellent ISPs in my area that are about $12 per month with unlimited access: Erols & Zzapp!. If your machine is prone to random middle of the night troubles, go with Erols cuz they have free 24/7 tech support. Under no circumstances should anyone ever pay more than $15 per month for an ISP- especially if it pesters you with ads & spam.
tom, they are plenty. Have you seen the daily tv ads for them? THey got like the Shaq doing them. They depend on if they have a local dialup in YOUR city. But we don’t know where that is…
This is slightly off topic, but I was in Ace Hardware the other day, and there were CDs for their free ISP service at the checkout counter. Everybody’s doing it!
RTFirefly, yeah that is right but you can get the software on the net from their site too. Its a little better than others I think because you can put it on two floppy disks.
Thanks, Bob. That was the sort of thing I was looking for. (Of course, it took me 'til now to work through the “second page” evaluations for each likely ISP. I wanted you guys to rate them for me. < eg > )