:: should I stay or should I go?

I'm seriously considering moving to another isp. There are a lot of reasons to move on; but there are equally compelling reasons to stay.

What's tipping me towards change at the moment is that Easynet's webmail, which I use when I'm at work, has developed some kind of intermittent fault; it's possibly at this end, ie to do with the firewall or whatever, but Easynet's techs are baffled.

So I'm using another webmail service (hushmail) in the meantime.

The webmail problem is just the latest in a line of problems. None of them alone is enough to persuade me to give up on Easynet, but en masse they're getting pretty irritating.

Like when I discovered on uploading the famous helicopter photos that I'd exceeded the 10Mb size limit on a website I'd previously believed was unlimited. Easynet very generously upped the limit to 20Mb -- which I notice from their website is now what they're limiting all users to. It's too complicated to go into here, but the kerfuffle meant I had to move my site from the hockadilly.co.uk "free domain" back to the clunkily-named easyweb.easynet/bja domain, where apparently I can still have unlimited space, doled out in grudging increments. So that makes having a free domain name fairly pointless (though I still have an index page there). Another irritation about that whole business was that there are two different methods for moving files around; FTP for the easyweb space and Microsoft webfolders for hockadilly. Why? Just to annoy me, I think.

The other reason for going is that by today's standards, Easynet is reasonably expensive. It's £12 a month and I pay for phone calls on top of that when I connect. By contrast, I could get 50Mb of webspace at Abel Gratis free, and they offer a bunch of techie stuff like my own cgi-bin, PHP, MySQL and ASP to boot, plus they allow e-commerce on the webspace, which Easynet doesn't without an extra charge (or so I was told ... their website implies that it's jim-dandy). Also, Abel's tech support is on a local rate call, which is something you have to watch out for -- some isps charge 50p a minute for support.

Abel is a Scottish isp, it has a lot of other services with varying rates. But I'm a tiny bit dubious, mainly because it's a small firm and if it goes belly-up I'll have to pack up my tent and move on again.

Another option is BT. Their Openworld Anytime account seems pricey at £16 a month, but you get 50Mb of space and you don't have to pay for connection for up to 150 hours a month. And I wouldn't be on that much. Oh, I've just checked my last phone bill and from 20 Nov to 12 Feb I was only online for about 20 hours in total. Hmmm, I might be better to go for no monthly charge and pay for my connection on the regular local rate. I'd still be saving a bit over Easynet though, and I'd be able to go online a lot more without worrying about the extra cost.

The reasons for not moving are that I'd have to change my email address and website url (though this blogspot address wouldn't change) and go through all the palaver of moving the site and informing everyone of the change. What a pain! But it's starting to look like a worthwhile effort. Having the blogspot makes it all a bit less hassle.