Afrihost vs OpenWeb

Zewp said:
Your usage definitely does not affect your experience. MrBeep has confirmed this multiple times and I can attest from experience. If you were having issues during daytime I'd say it was more likely to be a line fault or congested exchange. Here's my usage for the past few months.

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That's across two concurrent connections as too. I would definitely be considered a heavy user on a 1mb account. My download speeds are always great, my browsing is never anything but perfect and my overall experience is wonderful.

I would be very hard-pressed to find another ISP that can offer me this experience with this kind of usage. Not in the borders of this country, at least.
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No line fault or congested exchange, other ISP accounts were perfectly fine. The more I downloaded the worse browsing got, pushing 20gb a day meant even mybb wouldn't load between 8-5 pm, however at 17:01 browsing was full speed. Cutting usage to around 15GB a day and most websites were fine, but a bit slow. I even queried this with support and the reply I got was my usage for the month. Every ISP claims they don't shape based on usage but they do.
 
hammell said:
I'm with Openweb but keep having issues: aggressive shaping even on weekends, youtube playing only at 360p with no buffering, rather slow browsing, slow VPN access etc. That said, last time I was with Afrihost I was throttled when I hit about 30Gb - my speed was halved, then halved again etc. until I was on an almost dial up speed. Is this still the case? I change ISPs about every 6 months so maybe it's time to change again...
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I actually switched from OpenWeb Gold to Afrihost 2 months ago for that very reason. 90% of the time its perfect but that other 10% of the time even browsing can be very erratic.

With Afrihost on the other hand downloading during the day is significantly slower but browsing and streaming performance is always good. My after hours news downloads (10pm - 16am) maxes out my 2mb line just about all the time.

Which one is better really depends on you priorities - but if you want consistent browsing / streaming performance Afrihost has my vote.

Oh and I pull +- 220 GB month and never notice my browsing / streaming being affected by it.
 
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ill quickly add my 5 cents here...

4mbps gamers delight package:

Ive been with OW for about just over a year now. ill agree, 90% of time it is good. the other 10% was horrible. redo the account and boom works 100% again. I am not sure why that still keeps on happening but changing account names seems a bit daft to me, but it works. there support is excellent. well has been for me. always have gotten an reply within 30min.

axxess: (i think afrihost and axxess in some way or form are together? dont shoot me if they arent.)

I got an Axxess account from my work to test with for now (concurrent connection). 10mbps account and got 6mbps line. I did last weekend around 100GB in just origin downloads and steam. maxed out 6mbps for about 2days without issues. downloaded BF3 and all DLC's; crysis 3 and DS3. then far cry 3 on steam as well.

speeds during daytime is excellent on them so far.

to compare:

Axxess to me so far is better during the daytime. as well i am running the concurrent connection and other connection does about come we say 100-150GB a month and im doing about 300-400GB. I'll say that p2p is shaped during day, but not as much as OW. on OW p2p is non existent sorry to say. But when shaping/throttling lifts from OW then all hell breaks lose. and the unshaped weekends is good. Pings to BF3 servers on OW is around 10-40ms where as Axxess is 30ms-180ms, very erratic. after about 10min then gets stable and will settle to around 40ms give or take 3ms.

I am cancelling my OW acc. Axxess account for free from work. = saving R400 :D and i also have 20GB TI capped account for incase. my point of view all ISP has its pro's and con's. i dont game a lot online but i am happy with a ping of 30ms. OW just seems a bit unstable sometimes for my liking. and Axxess has good speeds during daytime. still stream 1080p no problem. OW that simply wont happen.
 
I'm going to add my 2 cents to this conversation as well.

I'm with Openweb on their Gold Uncapped Unshaped 4Mbps account.

When I was deciding on an ISP to choose I mailed all of them and discussed the type of packages they offered and what experience I could expect.

The main issue I ran into is I use between 350GB and 450GB consistently a month.
Some ISP's straight out told me I would be shaped/throttled.
Others said I should go with their business account.

Afrihost suggested I go onto their Business account, while Openweb said I would be fine on a Gold or Platinum package.
As I was trying to keep the cost under R1000 I couldn’t go for the platinum so I went with the Gold Uncapped Unshaped.

The only reason I didn’t go for Afrihost despite in my opinion Afrihost has a far superior support system, is their Star system.
I couldn’t get any guarantee of no shaping with that sort of usage.

I will admit with Openweb they aren’t perfect either, at the beginning there was a lot of teething issues.
Getting the "Unshaped" part of the account throughout the day took a while to get sorted out, but I now run 24/7 full 4Mbps at 441KBps, no matter my usage.

Sure sometimes the line slows down for no reason, example since Monday morning it has been a bit slow - around half speed - from around 1PM till 5PM but its full speed after those times. If it carries on I’ll contact support and they'll most likely give me a new account and it will all work. (Have gone through 5 accounts so far this year)

In my opinion if you’re trying to decide, look and see what you want out of the account, Afrihost seem great, particularly with support but they don’t seem to have any set limits in terms of when your line will slow down.

If @AfriMan can shed any light on this it would be great. My information is a few months old.

Openweb, they are great after a few e-mails back and forth.
You pay more on Openweb to have that speed.
 
AfriMan said:
We disagree. We believe that the internet is something that everyone needs, and it's a resource that we all draw on. We don't want to throttle people during the day, so we can unthrottle at night - we'd rather give everyone every available piece of our capacity 24/7. Most Uncapped packages promise unthrottling at hours like midnight to 8am, and we're pretty much always unshaped then anyway in all regions. However, when there is available capacity, many clients are unshaped during the day and night, regardless of the time or how little they have used. We think this is more like the direction uncapped should go in. At present the biggest barrier to getting closer to completely unshaped uncapped for everyone are Telkom's IPC costs. If those were to drop significantly, not ISPs would get away with throttling, which is why we've gotten rid of it entirely.

Shaping and throttling are very different things. With us, you always have your full line speed potential on your real time services, no matter how your P2P is shaped. That means you can still watch Full HD youtube videos or game with minimal latency. Throttling take your 4Mbps line and makes it a 512kbps or 1Mbps line - on all services. That is definitely not in line with how Uncapped works in other countries and not a direction we are keen to move in.
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You said it, it is so! Love it.
 
Phinix said:
I'm going to add my 2 cents to this conversation as well.

I'm with Openweb on their Gold Uncapped Unshaped 4Mbps account.

When I was deciding on an ISP to choose I mailed all of them and discussed the type of packages they offered and what experience I could expect.

The main issue I ran into is I use between 350GB and 450GB consistently a month.
Some ISP's straight out told me I would be shaped/throttled.
Others said I should go with their business account.

Afrihost suggested I go onto their Business account, while Openweb said I would be fine on a Gold or Platinum package.
As I was trying to keep the cost under R1000 I couldn’t go for the platinum so I went with the Gold Uncapped Unshaped.

The only reason I didn’t go for Afrihost despite in my opinion Afrihost has a far superior support system, is their Star system.
I couldn’t get any guarantee of no shaping with that sort of usage.

I will admit with Openweb they aren’t perfect either, at the beginning there was a lot of teething issues.
Getting the "Unshaped" part of the account throughout the day took a while to get sorted out, but I now run 24/7 full 4Mbps at 441KBps, no matter my usage.

Sure sometimes the line slows down for no reason, example since Monday morning it has been a bit slow - around half speed - from around 1PM till 5PM but its full speed after those times. If it carries on I’ll contact support and they'll most likely give me a new account and it will all work. (Have gone through 5 accounts so far this year)

In my opinion if you’re trying to decide, look and see what you want out of the account, Afrihost seem great, particularly with support but they don’t seem to have any set limits in terms of when your line will slow down.

If @AfriMan can shed any light on this it would be great. My information is a few months old.

Openweb, they are great after a few e-mails back and forth.
You pay more on Openweb to have that speed.
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I'm not sure when you mailed us, we used the star rating system quite a while ago, and only on IS Uncapped accounts, which have long been phased out. We don't use the rating system at all, or rolling window thresholds as we did previously.

Not sure if you want me to explain how it all works now, but basically we never throttle - and we only shape P2P (never real time services like gaming, browsing or streaming) when there is demand. Our aim is to shape the very least amount of clients and to the least extent to avoid increased latency on the network.

Let me know if you're keen to give our Uncapped a try :)
 
lestoran said:
I actually switched from OpenWeb Gold to Afrihost 2 months ago for that very reason. 90% of the time its perfect but that other 10% of the time even browsing can be very erratic.

With Afrihost on the other hand downloading during the day is significantly slower but browsing and streaming performance is always good. My after hours news downloads (10pm - 16am) maxes out my 2mb line just about all the time.

Which one is better really depends on you priorities - but if you want consistent browsing / streaming performance Afrihost has my vote.

Oh and I pull +- 220 GB month and never notice my browsing / streaming being affected by it.
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Glad to hear you are satisfied with our product. We do also have Business DSL for those who never want to be shaped :)
 
AfriMan said:
Glad to hear you are satisfied with our product. We do also have Business DSL for those who never want to be shaped :)
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Your shaping does not really bother me. I think Afrihost's approach of sacrificing non-realtime protocols to keep the realtime one's at full speed is perfect for my needs as well as those of my wife who works from home and needs 100% reliability when it comes to browsing and Skype. There's always "TurboCharge" if I need to download something in an emergency - think I've used it once so far but good idea anyway.

If anything I may upgrade to 4/10Mb at some point and ditch DSTV :-)
 
lestoran said:
Your shaping does not really bother me. I think Afrihost's approach of sacrificing non-realtime protocols to keep the realtime one's at full speed is perfect for my needs as well as those of my wife who works from home and needs 100% reliability when it comes to browsing and Skype. There's always "TurboCharge" if I need to download something in an emergency - think I've used it once so far but good idea anyway.

If anything I may upgrade to 4/10Mb at some point and ditch DSTV :-)
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Hopefully you'll be ditching DSTV for Netflix ;)
 
must say...i completely forgot about my free 1Gig Afrihost account. Am on it now...and it works like a dream...So Afriman...that 100Gig Bundle? ...its MINE! ;)
 
What's gaming like on 1Mb/s Afrihost uncapped VS OpenWeb 1Mb/s gold uncapped VS OW Silver uncapped VS OW Standard uncapped?

Also, I've seen specials for OpenWeb standard and gold, why isn't there a special for the silver?
 
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