Looking for bandwidth (in all the wrong places)

[mdlbear]

With the Fiancé (selkit) coming down soon from the frozen North for an extended stay with the Wolfling, the question of upgrading our miserable 384Kb/s DSL line once again comes up, this time with some urgency.

Simply upgrading in place with PacBell SBC AT&T doesn't look like a good option -- right now my 5 static IP addresses and hacker-friendly terms of service are grandfathered in. If I upgrade, I lose that unless I go with a business line (which of course is significantly more expensive). And even then I don't know for sure what their terms of service would be. I'd have to check. They do appear to have DSL without voice service, but there's no telling how long my service would be out if I tried to switch to it.

The move that looked best -- at least in terms of possible downtime -- a few weeks ago was to go with Speakeasy's OneLink (no voice, line from COVAD) plan. By adding the line before dumping AT&T, I could completely avoid a gap in service. They're hacker-friendly. Their terms of service are generous -- basically they don't care if you share your service or even charge your neighbors for it. They've also been bought by Best Buy, and the OneLink service is significantly more expensive than the others.

The other two options are DSL Extreme and Sonic. DSL Extreme is definitely the price leader. Sonic has consistently gotten extremely good reviews, and are known to be hacker-friendly. If I thought I could switch my existing line without downtime, I'd be most tempted by Sonic. Another plus is that, being located about 75mi North in Santa Rosa, they're comparatively local. Their 3-6Mb/s static IP service is only $10 more than what I'm paying now for 384K. The only question is whether I could switch without losing service for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

Finally, I could keep AT&T on my secondary line and add Sonic on my primary line. At that point I could dump AT&T's DSL and switch with no downtime. I could even dump the line altogether, though that would only save me some $18/month. That would probably take the longest, because AT&T would be sure to drag their feet. An alternative (which might get me better service but would be significantly more expensive) would be to add a cheap AT&T DSL to my primary line, then switch to Sonic on the business line.

For reasons of brevity I'm going to leave off some of the less attractive options, such as getting cable for bridge connectivity while switching carriers on the DSL line. All forty-seven verses of it.

OK, so I seem to have convinced myself that Sonic is the way to go. So the main choices are:

1. Switch to Sonic on my existing DSL line and take my chances with how long I'm without service during the transition.
2. Add Sonic on my primary line, then drop the secondary. Take my chances on how long it would take, including the possibility of AT&T putting roadblocks in the way like they did last time. Smoothest transition -- only one DNS change.

Any advice? There are additional questions, like how to bridge my email and locally-hosted websites if I go with option 1. But we'll go with this one basic choice for now.

I really don't have the time to be messing with this, but that's another matter.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I'd go with the add-then-drop alternative. That way screwups don't screw you in the data channel, just possibly the pocketbook. And you've only got one DNS change, and you can wait out the TTL before cueing the Johnny Paycheck for DeathStarCo.... ("Take this job and SHOVE IT!")

[mdlbear]

That's the way I'm leaning. The Death Star may still try to screw me over, but they're unlikely to leave me without both lines for very long.

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

I would have recommended fixed wireless since they have 3-6Mb symmetric data rates but the cost for that kind of service in San Jose is very high.

Add-then-drop seems the least disruptive, though you need to monitor your bills. I have a friend who did that and the old bill never went away. He simply stopped paying the old bill and ended up having his voice line shut down. It sucks to have integrated services.

I've heard good reviews of Sonic from friends.

VPS?

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

Would one of the virtual server accounts that are starting to show up let you get away without having the static IPs to your house?

You get a virtual machine at some hosting provider preinstalled with some flavor of Linux, root access, a static IP, and the ability to do all your own admin including installing pretty much whatever you want in the way of additional software. And a really fast internet connection and the expectation that you will be running publicly accessible servers on your system.

Accounts start at about $30/month.

Here's one:
http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Vps

I don't know if it would work for what you do or not, but it would probably be relatively cheap overall if it did. You could go with home grade DSL from the death star ($20/mo for 1.5 MBit, $25 for 3.0 MBit) or equivalent, and also lose your other external hosting account for thestarport.org.

Re: VPS?

[mdlbear]

That's another possibility, and I've looked at 1and1 specifically. There are still a lot of things in AT&T's terms of service I don't want, like not letting me share bandwidth or run servers. I still need a mail server, SSH server, web server, and Asterisk on the home box. But having root on an outside server that I could run multiple name-virtual-host websites on would be a big help.

It would also take a fair amount of work to set up, and the next couple of weeks are going to be *busy* as it is. Good eventual target, though.

Re: VPS?

[mdlbear]

Dreamhost.com is looking good, too. Very cheap. And come to think of it there might be something similar at Rahul.net, which would be even simpler for me -- I haven't been keeping up.

Think I'm still going to go ahead and sign up with sonic, though.

Re: VPS?

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Add-then-drop, and get a virtual server somewhere. That virtual server can also host a secondary MX while you're dealing with your DNS.

Re: VPS?

[mdlbear]

Signed on with Sonic yesterday. Still waiting to hear about an install date.