Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback

[AfriMan]

EAST .... I cant even b1tch to you on this forum the East is so frikken slow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Oh Fukitol forte .... shutting down and giving up.

We've managed to stabilise the North and South and seeing much better performance overall, but the East is still seeing high demand. We've still seen some periods of high demand in the East (though yesterday should have been good from my reports). We're focussing on the East performance now to make sure we optimise performance to reproduce the results we're seeing in other regions.

 

[AfriMan]

"South ADSL Network Demand"

"2014-09-03 05:14 PM There has been a increase in bandwidth demand in the Southern region (Cape Town and surrounding areas), particularly between 19h00 and 23h00. ADSL clients in this region may experience reduced download speeds during this period.


Our team is working to manage the increased demand to deliver the best possible internet experience in the affected region.



We sincerely apologise to all clients who have been affected and assure them that we will continue to work towards improving their experience."

Sigh. First of all what is it about the South that it keeps breaking? I swear it breaks once a month. At the start of the year (from jan to april) I actually kept score of North vs South breaks. It was 3 breakdowns in the South and 1 in the North and then I forgot to keep doing it . My point is the same though, why does the South consistently have more issues than the North?

Secondly, at what point does high demand become standard demand?

The South seems to have a very different overall usage pattern to other regions. For example, the upswing in traffic for the iOS 8 traffic was almost double what we saw in other regions, even though we have a much smaller network than the North. We're still learning more about how the South operates and how we can manage each region individually for the best results. For example, we're shaping at different times in the South to accommodate a later start in the mornings to peak traffic to try to give maximum benefit to clients in the region to be unshaped or less shaped.

 

[AfriMan]

This demand issue in the south doesn't seem to be affecting me. My latency is good as usual, and download speeds are as fast I could expect (800+KB/s on 8Mbit). BBC iPlayer and Youtube are streaming fine.

Glad to hear that. We're generally seeing better performance in the South. We've been running continuous testing in all regions to replicate what clients are experiencing as best we can.

 

[absynth]

The South seems to have a very different overall usage pattern to other regions. For example, the upswing in traffic for the iOS 8 traffic was almost double what we saw in other regions, even though we have a much smaller network than the North. We're still learning more about how the South operates and how we can manage each region individually for the best results. For example, we're shaping at different times in the South to accommodate a later start in the mornings to peak traffic to try to give maximum benefit to clients in the region to be unshaped or less shaped.

Just asking.Should business not be completely unshaped?

 

[AfriMan]

Speedtest gives me full line speed. NNTP traffic completely blocked (30Bps).

No shaping my ass.

I really wish Afrihost would be honest...

When I eventually forced a restart and got SAB running again my NZB's were limited to 10mb (on a 20mb line).


It is as plain as day that something is going on. Just tell us already...

We don't shape Business accounts. I think looking at a shaping policy that is not really going to helpful to you. We need to focus on troubleshooting and testing on what circumstances give you these results. This is my understanding of what Critical Care have been doing, as they have been in constant communication with you regarding this complaint. I think the best result is going to be for you to continue to work with them until you can figure this out or find a solution that works for your needs. I am sure they will achieve that for you.

 

[AfriMan]

When is 'peak' time though? It's a business account and is geared for daytime performance, so I would expect it to perform best then. Is peak 6-8pm? I haven't explicitly run tests during that time, but I'd know very quickly if there were issues. BBC iPlayer is usually in use around that time, two people are usually gaming online and I tend to watch Youtube sporadically throughout the day. I'd notice degraded performance as Youtube streams 720p. I got some P2P stuff downloading last night around midnight and within minutes the total speed was around 750KB/s.

Peak times is a pretty broad description. We'll generally see peaks in traffic at 8am to 9am, again between 11am and 12pm, and usually again around 5 to 8pm. That would be where traffic suddenly spikes because people are arriving at work, or arriving at home to run downloads or streaming. How the traffic performs during the day really depends on the users activity for the day. We usually see traffic start to die down just after 10pm.

 

[AfriMan]

Afrifail.....

WHY ARE BUSINESS ACCOUNT CUSTOMERS SHAPED/THROTTLED/WHATEVER if you claim that we are guaranteed full line speed and will never be throttled/shaped??

Change your claims on your website as this is clearly false advertising.

We pay a premium price for a supposed premium priduct, yet we sit with crap.
Give us what we pay for, case closed.

Business accounts are not shaped or throttled. If your experience is such that it feels like shaping, then we need to troubleshoot and see why that is. There are no shaping policies acting on Business accounts, so we have to look at what individual factors could be affecting your overall internet experience

 

[AfriMan]

I would like to know what is the total IPC capacity Afrihost currently has access to at each site?
From what I understand MTN has x amount and Afrihost leases a portion of the capacity.
Also what are the current usages patterns at each IPC in percentages. I am mainly interested in the Durban IPC.....

At the moment I'm not able to provide that info. What I can say is that we have dedicated IPC at each regional termination point for North (JHB), South (CT) and East (DBN). This is not shared with MTN or in contention with any other MTN services.

 

[AfriMan]

Everything seems back to its former glory here, for the time being! I hope it stays this way

That's great to hear. Definitely hope so too

 

[AfriMan]

Still getting 1m speeds on international. Local is fine. AH please explain why my business account is being shaped/throttled?

We're definitely not shaping or throttling international service, we don't really have systems to do that (we don't have a blended internet software element to our network).

We'll need to look at those results and check the routing to that international service to investigate further.

 

[Bursty-dude]

Line was running at the usual 5MB just before 8 this morning, sitting with this uselessness since just after 8:


Not shaped or throttled? Next joke please?

 

[AfriMan]

Afriman, Is it possible for a ISP to cause desynchronization or is that purely a line fault?

Not usually. Just from the ISP account, the line would remain synced if the ISP account dropped or was disconnecting. So the DSL light would remain solid throughout. It doesn't necessarily mean that that ISP account is at fault because sometimes the line can appear to be synced even though it is dropping the ISP connection as well. I've never seen a case where the ISP account caused the line to lose sync with the exchange port

 

[aucampia]

Afrihost clearly has no respect for their customers. On tuesday certail HTTP content was explicitly blocked. When I tried to download something from sourceforge it would do 17KB and then stop dead. If I switched to HTTPS which prevented conentet inspection download speeds was singificantly faster.

So I emailed afrihost and asked them to refund me, given the pathetic service they delivered. They say no, and say the problem is business optimization was turned on on my account (which it was not the case last time I checked). Clearly though the person responding on this support issue had no clue how QoS optimization is supposed to work. It should only prioritize data, and if the only thing running is the lower priority connection then it should still be able go get full speed as there will be nothing running with higher priority. So business optimization can in no way explain the behaviour I saw as my line was completely idle except for the attempted sourceforge download.

In another response they also told me to switch to business uncapped if I have issues (which I was already on).

This disrespectful tendencies from Afrihost has to end. Please cancel your line with them immediately. They have no interest in providing good service, only in treating their customers as cash cows and trivializing their issues instead of being honest and upfront about whats happening to their network and changes they make to their network.

 

[aucampia]

There is nothing as sickening as their incenscere desire to "troubleshoot" something which they already clearly know the cause for and just dont want to communicate to their customers.

Your customers are not idiots, retards or little children. Treat them with some respect.

 

[AfriMan]

There is nothing as sickening as their incenscere desire to "troubleshoot" something which they already clearly know the cause for and just dont want to communicate to their customers.

Your customers are not idiots, retards or little children. Treat them with some respect.

I see you're posting on all our threads. I would genuinely like to help. You are welcome to send me a PM and I'll try and resolve this with you.

 

[aucampia]

I see you're posting on all our threads. I would genuinely like to help. You are welcome to send me a PM and I'll try and resolve this with you.

Another inscenscere attempt to "troubleshoot". I'm over it, help by refunding me for the pathetic service you delivered. But even if you do I will not stop untill you go out of business.

 

[cortexenslaver]

@AfriMan
PM sent... please take a look at my account to see if the CZ issues I am experiencing "could" be causing me discomfort. Exchange is not congested, and all other ISP accounts work as they should. I also have an open ticket that has not been responded to in a week:

[#HTB-120-20710]

Let me know what you need from me. Need a way forward.

 

[aucampia]

@AfriMan
PM sent... please take a look at my account to see if the CZ issues I am experiencing "could" be causing me discomfort. Exchange is not congested, and all other ISP accounts work as they should. I also have an open ticket that has not been responded to in a week:

[#HTB-120-20710]

Let me know what you need from me. Need a way forward.

The only way forward is to switch to another provider. Of all the sub standard service providers in this country Afrihost is by far the worst.

 

[cortexenslaver]

The only way forward is to switch to another provider. Of all the sub standard service providers in this country Afrihost is by far the worst.

Agreed, but I cannot afford to go through this again. I want the product I had from November 2013 till July 2014. Plus, no other package out there will give me the amount of data I need without any restrictions. I cannot move back to watching my usage, or STAR ratings, etc. I need to have speed and performance on demand, without worrying about the cost/shaping policy/throttling.

Right now this is a major inconvenience.... but maybe if I jump through a few more hoops, AH may find an issue with my account and I can get it sorted

EDIT: As you can see, I am trying really hard to be civil and constructive - maybe it works???

 

[Ripstorm]

I cancelled my AH account at the beginning of the month, but decided to re-activate my account as twitch streaming is much better than before. I just hope they can fix this whole capacity issue soon.

I will probably get flamed for this, but I still think that this account needs to be throttled as soon as the user reaches +-500GB of data.
These mofo's using up to a TB of data a month is just spoiling it for all of us