Mweb customer - switch to Afrihost?

[TirNaNog]

Today is my first day on Afrihost uncapped 4Mbps. Previously with Mweb I noticed heavy shaping when I downloaded from one of our FTP sites - the site would hover at top speed for 30 seconds then drop right down to 9kBps for the remainder of the download. I am about to test that on Afrihost in a minute, but speedtest.net has never been as good as it is now on Afrihost...

In fact, I have to ask, how is it possible to get 5.4Mbps on a 4Mbps line?



And as for the upload, I never got more than 300 odd Kbps on MWEB so needless to say I am BAIE GELUKKIG!

To be fair to Mweb, it has to be said that they include 3Gb of hotspot wifi access with their standard 4Gb uncapped ADSL product. At Afrihost it's and extra R40 per month per gig. That said, I don't need the wifi and will rather buy as required at the hotspot, but I thought it's worth a mention if you are already using it.

The only thing about this deal that makes me nervous is the 'Internet Solutions' bit. I have memories of international latency on Sat links over IS. Hopefully it has changed?

Ho hum...
seems Afrihost's throttling is similar to Mwebs. My FTP from my own site comes down at a decent pace for 30 seconds then is brought down to 20kbps. Afriman, can you confirm - is this normal? Why would an international FTP transfer be limited like this? It starts off at 200kbps then after 30 seconds drops right down to 20... literally falls off the cliff... I can send you details to test if you like. I did test this on a capped account recently and never saw this issue. I assume it's Afrihost's shaping coming into play? Didn't think shaping applied to FTP though.

[AfriMan]

Today is my first day on Afrihost uncapped 4Mbps. Previously with Mweb I noticed heavy shaping when I downloaded from one of our FTP sites - the site would hover at top speed for 30 seconds then drop right down to 9kBps for the remainder of the download. I am about to test that on Afrihost in a minute, but speedtest.net has never been as good as it is now on Afrihost...

In fact, I have to ask, how is it possible to get 5.4Mbps on a 4Mbps line?



And as for the upload, I never got more than 300 odd Kbps on MWEB so needless to say I am BAIE GELUKKIG!

To be fair to Mweb, it has to be said that they include 3Gb of hotspot wifi access with their standard 4Gb uncapped ADSL product. At Afrihost it's and extra R40 per month per gig. That said, I don't need the wifi and will rather buy as required at the hotspot, but I thought it's worth a mention if you are already using it.

The only thing about this deal that makes me nervous is the 'Internet Solutions' bit. I have memories of international latency on Sat links over IS. Hopefully it has changed?

Ho hum...
seems Afrihost's throttling is similar to Mwebs. My FTP from my own site comes down at a decent pace for 30 seconds then is brought down to 20kbps. Afriman, can you confirm - is this normal? Why would an international FTP transfer be limited like this? It starts off at 200kbps then after 30 seconds drops right down to 20... literally falls off the cliff... I can send you details to test if you like. I did test this on a capped account recently and never saw this issue. I assume it's Afrihost's shaping coming into play? Didn't think shaping applied to FTP though.

We don't apply shaping to FTP, but would appreciate the testing if you could PM me? I can also give you a capped account to run a comparative test.

Looks strange, no doubt

[TirNaNog]

We don't apply shaping to FTP, but would appreciate the testing if you could PM me? I can also give you a capped account to run a comparative test.

Looks strange, no doubt

Great, thanks Afriman - I'll pm you. I have already tested with another Afrihost (capped) account and it's fine. I had this same issue on Mweb uncapped. I'm wondering if it's seeing my FileZilla server as something other than FTP?

[TirNaNog]

K, have sent PM, let me know if you find anything

[AfriMan]

K, have sent PM, let me know if you find anything

Got your PM, will go through it with one of our experts.

[TirNaNog]

Got your PM, will go through it with one of our experts.

Ok - have resent details in case you got the wrong details. As mentioned earlier, it doesn't happen on an Afrihost capped account, so this is not an issue at the hosting provider. It's a real issue for us and part of the reason I switched off MWEB. Thanks for taking the time to investigate.

[TirNaNog]

So today has been a bit of a trainsmash with the internet. It's been dog slow. Right now I'm not doing anything significant and my speeds are really poor... Even speedtest.net loads slooooowly. I started loading it as I began typing this... it's just finished loading. There may be an issue today, I don't know, but I'm very unhappy...
Compare that to my first speed test...


Please confirm that there is indeed an issue with IS or Afrihost at the moment? I recall bad spells with Mweb but not this consistently bad...

[TirNaNog]

Ok, I'm back on after much back and forth. Turns out my router was still trying to talk to Mweb and I had to jump through hoops to get them flushed out of my system. I have a dd-wrt, but my modem-router that dd-wrt was dialling pppoe through was also connecting to Mweb over PPPOE direct. Speed is back to average. The big diffs here (between Mweb and Afrihost) is that Afrihost's speed test is generally up and down... very inconsistent. Sometimes i'll get over 5Mbps, sometimes way under because of the dips. My next move is to monitor it and perhaps get Telkom to bring my line sync down from 7Mbps - I have no idea when they changed that. I'll keep you posted.

On the FTP issue, it still persists... if I (for example) use Firefox to download, it starts the download at up to 200kBps (2 meg - not bad for international), but after about 30 seconds it dips right down to under 20kBps (200k). If I immediately pause the download, wait a few seconds and resume, it continues at 20kBps. If I cancel it and start all over again (also immediately), it starts off at 200kBps all over again... and after another 30 or so seconds, it drops right down. Different result using a capped account. There's definitely something fishy - please check with the tech guys on this one. I'm happy for someone to teamviewer into my machine to test if they like.