On the off chance anyone noticed, my site (along with all other sites I host) had about two hours of downtime earlier today. Sorry about that — as it turns out, the DSL modem had frozen up, probably from overheating thanks to the poor ventilation in my apartment. Once it was reset it was fine. Sorry ‘bout that.
While I was bouncing around Speakeasy’s site during the initial round of “what’s going on?” troubleshooting, I ran into some interesting information that may lead to me ditching my current phone service with Qwest.
Item One: Speakeasy OneLink — DSL service that doesn’t require a phone line.
Item Two: Speakeasy Voice — VoIP service.
Item Three: Nice savings when you order both packages.
I already use Speakeasy as my broadband provider, and I’ve been very happy with the service I get from them. I have a good package for a reasonable price, and the few times I’ve had to call tech support, they’ve been quick, friendly, and very friendly (and occasionally just a little bit silly).
I currently use Qwest for my phone service, and have very intentionally been getting the bare minimum necessary package. For me, that means about $30/month for basic phone service plus voice mail, and nothing else. No caller ID, no call waiting, no other fancy features — and no long distance.
According to Speakeasy’s site, if I were to switch over to their VoIP service, I’d get unlimited long distance in the US and Canada, voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, last call return, do not disturb, and I’d even get to keep the same phone number I’d have now — all for the same price as my current basic service from Qwest.
If I switched over to both OneLink and VoIP, my final cost would be about $6/month more than what I’m paying now, but the first three months would be cheaper, as you get a “free three months” for signing up (some of which are offset by the setup costs, but that’s expected). All in all, this sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.
Giving this one some serious thought.
“Predator (Final)” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 6:32).
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We use Vonage and it’s the best decision we made… 4 numbers and our monthly bill is about $45 cheaper than it was with BellSouth
Speakeasy just doesn’t seem competitive to me. The prices in general seem higher than service from other companies, although for some the customer support may be worth the extra cost.
It’s not just the customer support, though that’s certainly a large part of it. It’s also the value of what they provide — the old adage of “you get what you pay for” definitely applies.
For instance, the package I use — the midlevel ‘sysadmin’ package — provides nice high speeds (1.5 incoming/768 outgoing) that allow me to download at a very comfortable rate and have enough bandwidth for the sites I host, gives me two static IPs (one for my work machine and one for my webserver), multiple e-mail addresses (only one of which I’m even using), a little bit of hosted webspace if I need it, 56k dialup in case of emergencies, and a shell account. All in all, it’s not a bad deal.
But one of the biggest sales points for me is their open server policy. Many other ISPs will lock down certain ports to prevent you from running servers, or restrict how many computers you can hook up to their network — Speakeasy, on the other hand, just hooks you up and opens up the pipe.
My current setup sends one static IP to my router, which then splits the connection using dynamic addressing over the LAN to two computers. The other static IP goes to my webserver, which uses Apache’s virtual hosting to host five domains, two of which are configured to send and receive e-mail. There’s no way that this setup would fly on many other ISP’s networks, but as long as I keep my bills paid, Speakeasy lets me do what I want — and for me, that’s worth paying a little bit more for.
But then, I’m a Mac user. I’m used to paying a bit of a premium to have a system that does what I want and does it reliably.
They do offer options that are tough to find elsewhere and I’ve often considered taking them up on it, but in the past I’ve usually just gone with the ‘plain vanilla’ dsl or cable from whoever offers it cheapest and my hosting ends up with a remote host. I could probably combine the cost of these two services and do something similar to what you are doing, but I immediately run away from this idea when I consider the hassles that can come with maintaining my own server and the concern that the limited upload speed of residential broadband may not be able to handle the handful of sites I host.
I’ll be moving into a new permanent place in Seattle soon and have been eye-balling Speakeasy again. I have a soft spot for the company since I used to hang out at the cafe in the late 90s when I lived here last. I walk by it’s burned out shell often and it’s sad to think it’s not around in that form anymore.