If my ISP went down completely twice in less than six months, I'd be looking for a new ISP!
I'm giving them another chance. I know which router it is they just replaced, as I noticed it when I was first there mainly because it had a small Post-It over one of the ports labeled "Bad". They said that's the one they replaced and that they're going through and replacing all of the existing routers, and doing it before they reach a point where they have to in order to get the connections back up.
But the bigger reason I'm sticking with them is that they're charging me about 1/6th what any other ISP would charge and are not requiring me to use rack-mount equipment. At current income levels, we couldn't afford to keep the site running at most ISP's, much less buy expensive, underpowered rack-compatible machines. By being able to put our machines on shelves we're able to get a LOT more bang for the buck from our hardware dollars. If we had to buy rackspace sufficient to hold the machines we're using, the ISP bill would be even higher.
It also helps that though they're very far from my house, they're the easiest/quickest for me to get to, and I've used them as my primary dialup ISP for several years and they've been very reliable. Judging from conversations with other folks using dialup, they're among the most reliable in town.
Oh, and that 1/6th price is compared to T1-sized bandwidth at other providers. At this ISP I'm getting non-throttled access to a shared 100MB pipe. We're probably the busiest site that's co-located there so the lion's share of that pipe is always available, though it's likely a relatively moot point since I think the site would run just as well as it does now on a 512Mb pipe, and T1 size would currently be a lot of excess capacity, but won't be if the site ever *really* takes off.
On a related note, AT&T's T1 pricing is now $650 per month and, shockingly, I can get it at my house. I can't even get cable TV, but I can get T1 and they won't charge me for installation or the cost of running high-enough quality line to my house, which I believe might be a 12-mile run, and am sure is at least 2.5 miles. I think they're insane to make that kind of offer, but alas, I or Investors Hub can't currently afford to take them up on it.
If/when we can get me T1, I intend to mirror the site onto my server so we'll have up-to-the-second remote backups and a complete redundant copy of the site to take over in case of ISP problems or our own hardware/software problems at the current machines.
Besides, I'd be so much more productive with broadband. Terminal Services is painfully slow on dialup.
A case could be made for getting the T1, dropping the ISP, and hosting the site from my house. A very strong case, actually, but I don't have the T1, have no idea how reliable it'll be, and though I've got UPS's, a generator, and one heckuva security system, having it all in a room at my house would make me feel that the site is somehow more "vulnerable". But it'd be great to have such good access to the machines, as they're having problems right now that I've had to make stop-gap patches for, but could address quickly and completely if they were right here.
Besides, if my daughter were on her machine doing her typical bandwidth-intensive stuff, that'd kinda suck for all of us to feel the slowdown. Although I could always slap the modem in her machine and just make her stick with dialup.
