[ic] OT, but relevant?

[Doug Alcorn]

Chris Jesseman <chris@sitemajic.net> writes:

> Personally, I would not mess with an ISP with less than 5 thousand
> dialup subscribers...

Picking an ISP is a fairly hard thing to do.  It's not nearly so easy
as shoping for a computer or a car or even a house.  In all these
cases it is fairly easy to compare the actual features across
products.  With the case of an ISP the primary information you have to
go by is the homepage the ISP puts up.  Certainly its size contributes
to its experience.

However, the reason I decided to follow up to this is your comment
about measuring an ISP by the number of dialup subscribers.  I'm not
sure there is a correlation between dialup subscribers and web-hosting
quality.  I think they're two different beast.  Its kind of like
saying, "I wouldn't get my car serviced at a dealership that didn't
sell more than 10,000 cars a year."  The two measures seem orthoganal.

In fact, common wisdom says the opposite.  Most people agree that the
secret to a good mechanic is find a guy (or gal, I guess) who
specializes in exactly your car's make and model.  If this analogy
holds up, I would think an ISP that does web-hosting (or e-commerce,
or even interchange) only would be more focused on the types of
problems you (as a customer) will have.
-- 
 (__)  Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
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