I just cancelled my Earthlink accounts (one for general internet access, one for DSL). I’ve had the DSL account for five years and the general account for… uh… ten years, maybe? I opened it long enough ago that my email address was a single dictionary word. It’s a little odd to no longer have that as my default email address, but I’ll get used to it.\n<\/p>\n
There were several reasons. One was that the quality of their customer support declined rather sharply when they outsourced the operation to India. Another was that I discovered that Comcast’s cable-modem service costs the same as Earthlink’s DSL service and is dramatically faster. (Suddenly YouTube makes sense. At DSL speeds all of the videos are blurry and not terribly fun to watch; at cable speeds they look like local video files.)\n<\/p>\n
The big reason, though, was that around the beginning of September they had a massive DNS screw-up that prevented me–and all of their other customers, I think–from reaching my websites, which are hosted by Lunarpages, and from reaching Lunarpages itself. Not being able to get to your own commercial website is a Bad Thing. You can’t take orders, you can’t handle customer correspondence, you can’t do anything.\n<\/p>\n
At first I assumed the problem was with Lunarpages, but after six or seven hours I managed to deduce that it was actually Earthlink’s issue. Earthlink was no help at all with this deduction. The best they could do was to say [in badly punctuated English] that their “Engineers were facing the issue” and that it would be resolved in a couple of hours, and suggested that I use a proxy server in the mean time. The proxy service they pointed me towards put up a series of banner ads and then crashed the chat window I was using to talk to Earthlink. It also wasn’t any use for establishing a secure connection to the admin section of my website.\n<\/p>\n
Meanwhile I had started an email conversation with Lunarpages, who were considerably more helpful, even after it was established that it wasn’t their problem. They pointed me towards a very handy PC utility called TreeWalkDNS. It acts as a local DNS server and hence circumvented the Earthlink failure. That put me back in touch with my sites. The support folks at Lunarpages have always been very helpful on the occasions I’ve contacted them, but that day they really rose to the occasion.\n<\/p>\n
Once that was sorted out I started investigating options for a different ISP. Comcast turned out to be the apparent best choice here, so I called them up and established that they would indeed sell me internet service without regular TV service. (I don’t even have a TV, so cable TV service wouldn’t do me much good even if I wanted it.) They had an installer here on the next business day and he had the installtion done in an hour or so, despite the fact that my house’s junction box is so old that he didn’t recognize it for what it was and that the other end of the cable was buried underneath the pedestal.\n<\/p>\n
Earthlink never did acknowledge the problem publicly; their network status page on the support section of their site continued to claim that there were no issues with their DNS. This persisted even after a message thread on a Lunarpages forum confirmed that they had admitted to other customers that they knew of the problem, and were handing out new IP addresses for their DNS. So the short version is that they lied to me about the problem. (Shocked I am, yes, shocked.)\n<\/p>\n
So, we ran with Comcast for about three weeks and became convinced that it was reliable enough for our rather steady ‘net usage, and today I called up Earthlink and cancelled. They didn’t seem terribly concerned about retaining my business. When the operator asked what my reason was, I told her that I had several and inquired whether she wanted to hear all of them. Apparently that response wasn’t covered by her script because she went ahead to the next step after a rather nonsensical reply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just cancelled my Earthlink accounts (one for general internet access, one for DSL). I’ve had the DSL account for five years and the general account for… uh… ten years, maybe? I opened it long enough ago that my email address was a single dictionary word. It’s a little odd to no longer have that… Continue reading Earthlink Sucks, Lunarpages Rocks, and Comcast Blazes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}