Afrihost service terrible

P

Ph@ntom

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The past 3 weeks has been an absolute nightmare, regarding my service experience with Afrihost.
I use my connection mainly for MMO gaming towards a European server. Before Nov, and with an 8Mb connection, I used to get very solid latencies with some disconnects. 180-220ms was the average. I was satisfied even when I scaled back to a 1Mb conn. But since mid Oct, everything became worse. Latencies went up and disconnects were frequent in a single day. This on a capped and unshaped account!

I really don't think the move towards the MTN network was a smart thing. I even wrote a ticket complaining about the frequent disconnects and high latencies, then only received a lazy copy/paste respons from some "Bongani" guy stating that a link has been lost between JHB and CPT. If they payed attention to my ticket, they should have noted that my actual problem has persisted before the technical issue that Afrihost experienced.
This morning I've submit another ticket, then shortly after I received an SMS asking me to rate their quality of service. How the hell can I rate a service if I didn't even receive a response in the first place? So there, 0. That's my score.

What the hell... I decided to give Openweb a shot. Just a small 2gig account to see what their unshaped budget capped package is all about. And would you know it - I'm back on IS (right?) and my latencies are back to normal. Around 200ms and NO DISCONNECTS whatsoever. As for Afrihost, I think I'm done with you.
 
I can confirm rock solid latencies and no disconnects from Openweb thus far. Everything smooth and 100%.
Out of curiosity, I went to check up on my Afrihost account, to see if my gaming woes with them still persist. Logged into WOW with 220-230ms latency which I thought was ok. Only to discover after 10 minutes, a huge lag spike occured, that eventually ended up in a game disconnect. And that was the story last night - I had to apologise to my guild raiding buds in Europe as to why I caused the raid last night to fail several times because of my ISP's frikken latency and DC issues.

I've always been happy with Afrihost. Their website is easy to use and their ADSL service served me well for more than a year. But now it has to come down to this; I won't continue my support with them anymore. IMHO they should have slowly and gradually migrated to MTN, in the process ironing out the teething issues along the way that so many users experienced. The sudden change was too sudden and now they've burned themselves.
 
Ph@ntom said:
I can confirm rock solid latencies and no disconnects from Openweb thus far. Everything smooth and 100%.
Out of curiosity, I went to check up on my Afrihost account, to see if my gaming woes with them still persist. Logged into WOW with 220-230ms latency which I thought was ok. Only to discover after 10 minutes, a huge lag spike occured, that eventually ended up in a game disconnect. And that was the story last night - I had to apologise to my guild raiding buds in Europe as to why I caused the raid last night to fail several times because of my ISP's frikken latency and DC issues.

I've always been happy with Afrihost. Their website is easy to use and their ADSL service served me well for more than a year. But now it has to come down to this; I won't continue my support with them anymore. IMHO they should have slowly and gradually migrated to MTN, in the process ironing out the teething issues along the way that so many users experienced. The sudden change was too sudden and now they've burned themselves.
Click to expand...

Been forced to use afrihost over the weekend cause of all the Telkom saix issue and I can say I am not impressed the connection speeds are crap aswell as the latency (wow unplayable on afrihost), not to mention I just lose connection to afrihost, my connection does not drop and I stay connected but there is no communication to there servers for a few min and it seem to happen every 30min or so. Seems like they are only good for late night downloading and some web surfing.
 
I think I've discovered the problem as explained on the Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback thread:

Tracee said explained:
"They are having problems, but I have figured a way around the timeouts while gaming. I'll try and explain it so it is easy to understand. Basically when you are web browsing, on their end your connection appears to be in use, when you are gaming, your connection appears idle. They are resetting idle connections, so every one who is gaming gets an automatic reset (dropped connection) every 20 minutes or so, as it appears that your connection is idle.

The way around this is to open another tab and run an ajax script that auto refreshes, so your your connection does not appear to be idle.

Try this one:

http://www.jquery4u.com/demos/auto-refresh-div-content/

It is not perfect, but it may help gamers through, while they sort out their issues. Hopefully they will think about the gamers soon and not just about people browsing the web."
 
would a continues ping on say afrihost.co.za not work aswell?
 
Last edited:
Ph@ntom said:
I think I've discovered the problem as explained on the Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback thread:

Tracee said explained:
"They are having problems, but I have figured a way around the timeouts while gaming. I'll try and explain it so it is easy to understand. Basically when you are web browsing, on their end your connection appears to be in use, when you are gaming, your connection appears idle. They are resetting idle connections, so every one who is gaming gets an automatic reset (dropped connection) every 20 minutes or so, as it appears that your connection is idle.

The way around this is to open another tab and run an ajax script that auto refreshes, so your your connection does not appear to be idle.

Try this one:

http://www.jquery4u.com/demos/auto-refresh-div-content/

It is not perfect, but it may help gamers through, while they sort out their issues. Hopefully they will think about the gamers soon and not just about people browsing the web."
Click to expand...

I have a monitoring program downloading webpages from google once a minute, as well as pinging, and establishing other TCP sessions.
It makes no difference. The problem is intermittent packet loss.
 
Sinbad said:
I have a monitoring program downloading webpages from google once a minute, as well as pinging, and establishing other TCP sessions.
It makes no difference. The problem is intermittent packet loss.
Click to expand...

I just got off the phone with Afrihost and I told them about the intermittent packet loss but they said there is nothing wrong on there network and it must be line.......but it does not happen on web Africa or Telkom so yea its like hitting your head against a wall with afrihost
 
Croatoa said:
I just got off the phone with Afrihost and I told them about the intermittent packet loss but they said there is nothing wrong on there network and it must be line.......but it does not happen on web Africa or Telkom so yea its like hitting your head against a wall with afrihost
Click to expand...

I've told the focus group feedback people about it... Let's see what happens
 
At least for now, people should try the above method for what it's worth, even with all the packet loss going on. It might just work for some.
For now, I will keep my Afrihost account until it expires month end. I will only resume it if they've rectified these issues in this month.
 
Was on the edge of canceling my account last night after having authentication issues. Will let it run till month end and decide
 
Ph@ntom said:
I think I've discovered the problem as explained on the Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback thread:

Tracee said explained:
"They are having problems, but I have figured a way around the timeouts while gaming. I'll try and explain it so it is easy to understand. Basically when you are web browsing, on their end your connection appears to be in use, when you are gaming, your connection appears idle. They are resetting idle connections, so every one who is gaming gets an automatic reset (dropped connection) every 20 minutes or so, as it appears that your connection is idle.

The way around this is to open another tab and run an ajax script that auto refreshes, so your your connection does not appear to be idle.

Try this one:

http://www.jquery4u.com/demos/auto-refresh-div-content/

It is not perfect, but it may help gamers through, while they sort out their issues. Hopefully they will think about the gamers soon and not just about people browsing the web."
Click to expand...

You're seriously smoking pop rocks if you think a continuous ping is going to solve this issue lol. You still clearly didnt listen to what i said in the other thread a connection is not IDLE when you have a active TCP inbound and outbound connection going. There is active traffic running through the line at variable speeds. So HOW do you come up with that the connection is idle. l2network.
 
semaphore said:
You're seriously smoking pop rocks if you think a continuous ping is going to solve this issue lol. You still clearly didnt listen to what i said in the other thread a connection is not IDLE when you have a active TCP inbound and outbound connection going. There is active traffic running through the line at variable speeds. So HOW do you come up with that the connection is idle. l2network.
Click to expand...

So what about all the games that use UDP where there is no session to track? Incidentally, continuous ping will do jack **** as it uses ICMP and again has no session. The monitoring software they appear to be using monitors HTTP traffic and sends a TCP RST to idle connections, confirmed as I can use my Linux firewall to log those RST's.
 
coop said:
So what about all the games that use UDP where there is no session to track? Incidentally, continuous ping will do jack **** as it uses ICMP and again has no session. The monitoring software they appear to be using monitors HTTP traffic and sends a TCP RST to idle connections, confirmed as I can use my Linux firewall to log those RST's.
Click to expand...

You can't prove where the rst came from though.

Besides, my constant http traffic calls you a liar :-P
 
Sinbad said:
You can't prove where the rst came from though.

Besides, my constant http traffic calls you a liar :-P
Click to expand...

True, I can't prove it, but typically, with internet games, they use an initial TCP connection to authenticate, then once logged in, UDP packets are used to transfer gaming data such as position information and movement information as it has a lower overhead. This leaves an idle open TCP connection representing the login.

Now on a network, typically, routers have buffers that have entries relating to the open TCP connections using that router. Idle TCP sessions will eventually fill the routers buffers, so some routers will assume TCP sessions that have been idle for a period of time (lets say 20 minutes) are no longer in use. When they do so, they will flush the entry out of the routers buffer and send RST packets to both ends of the connection. Doing this allows the oruter to maintain smaller buffers and speed throughput for other users.

This is a common cause of issues with gaming.
 
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