Official Afrihost Q&A Thread

Yeh - I'm also happy on Mweb at the moment, using the 512 - but will upgrade to 4MBs starting May... hopefully all is still good then.

Also waiting for my refund - Gian did say about a week, so I'll give it till end of next week and then ask my credit card company to investigate - not going to finance Afrihost, and considering people are still leaving them this month - I don't want to be on the receiving end if they run out of money :p

The fact that they don't respond on MyBB any-more is also a bit of a concern.
 
If I had known upfront that it was 30GB or even 60GB, as I don't use P2P applications, I would have been happy, but the AuP stated 200Gig so I let the wife download some movies.
We had already hit 44GB by the time I saw the changes, so I now face the prospect of not having a full 4Meg line for the rest of the month, even though I have put a halt on all non essential Downloads. Fortunately I never canceled my 5 gig account, so I can use that when I need full speed. I will stay with Afrihost till the 24th, and will not request a refund as I have had my moneys worth in the 44Gig ( I am even tempted to now set it up for constant downloads, just to see what happens) but then it is bye bye to them and a switch to an ISP that shapes without throttling and communicates with users and provides feedback. Come on Web Africa, let me switch my 5Gig to uncapped please :)
 
I can't believe that people are still expecting refunds, and I consider it way beyond the call of duty that Afrihost are still offering them. Gian let everyone their shaping/throttling policies at the end of March and offered people refunds for April then. Imho, anyone who cancelled after 31 March should not qualify for a refund. You knew from the outset of the month what their policies were for April and now that you experiencing it you should not expect to be refunded.
 
caroper said:
( I am even tempted to now set it up for constant downloads, just to see what happens)
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LoL I am doing that at the moment. I usually went through around 100 gigs a month but if this is how Afrihost wants to play I will be downloading 24/7. Something I was never planning on doing in the first place.
 
Rodent-Boy said:
I can't believe that people are still expecting refunds, and I consider it way beyond the call of duty that Afrihost are still offering them. Gian let everyone their shaping/throttling policies at the end of March and offered people refunds for April then. Imho, anyone who cancelled after 31 March should not qualify for a refund. You knew from the outset of the month what their policies were for April and now that you experiencing it you should not expect to be refunded.
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He did? I never received any notice about it on my mailbox. I only found out last night on these forums.
 
It is because of download hogs that they have to put fair usage policies. People are very quick to slate telkom for everything but please take responsibility for your own actions!!!
 
@Rodent-Boy, unfortunately Afrihost made no attempt to notify us that they we're doing such a radical change to their policy, some of us only found out later in April that something has changed since we joined already in March. Those subscribing after April and having had the opportunity to read the new terms before joining is a different matter, the rest of us just let out debit orders continue rolling into April.
 
Rodent-Boy said:
I can't believe that people are still expecting refunds, and I consider it way beyond the call of duty that Afrihost are still offering them. Gian let everyone their shaping/throttling policies at the end of March and offered people refunds for April then. Imho, anyone who cancelled after 31 March should not qualify for a refund. You knew from the outset of the month what their policies were for April and now that you experiencing it you should not expect to be refunded.
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Wrong! I had no idea that the policies had changed until I wandered back into these forums last night. Their current FUP is not the one that I acknowledged and agreed to on March 27th and they've made no effort to contact me telephonically or via e-mail to inform me of these changes. Personally, I'm not bothered about getting a refund but if the service is going to get lousy once I hit 15GB; I'll go elsewhere.
 
The refund offer was specifically for MyBB users, and I think it would be fair to say MyBB regulars. If you wander in here once in a blue moon I'm not sure that AH should feel obligated to refund you.

Yes, I agree that they are just digging a deeper hole for themselves by not sending an email with notification of FUP. I agree that there is something ethically awry with them not doing so. (Then again, I was openly critical of the term "uncapped" even when they were talking "hundreds of gigs.") But the refund thing was always an unnecessary show of goodwill and they would be perfectly within their rights to lift it now.
 
Mamajyot said:
It is because of download hogs that they have to put fair usage policies. People are very quick to slate telkom for everything but please take responsibility for your own actions!!!
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No, it is because some ISP's are trying to make a quick buck and not having invested in the necessary infrastructure...

After all those years of ripping off consumers, one would have thought they have at least invested some of the money they have made in their infrastructure (MWEB, comes to mind) - and please don't fall for the story that only Telkom is to blame - if you do; you are nothing but ignorant.
 
Lulz, we were the ones calling for a response from Afrihost a month ago. If Gian had said, "Our infrastructure doesn't support it and we need a year to do upgrades," everyone would have labelled AH as WA2 and moved on anyway.
 
Well - now everyone is moving away with a sour taste in their mouth's :)
 
Rodent-Boy said:
Lulz, we were the ones calling for a response from Afrihost a month ago. If Gian had said, "Our infrastructure doesn't support it and we need a year to do upgrades," everyone would have labelled AH as WA2 and moved on anyway.
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NO actually most of us would have plodded along for a while to see feedback from the other uncapped suppliers before changing. We only upgraded because it looked like a sweet deal from our "favourite" ISP.
 
What still gets me is this: By needing an uncapped line you obviously require higher data usage than lighter users (who may only browse, watch the odd clip, etc). Afrihost provides this service and cites potential "abusers" as being the need for them to throttle, yet their throttling policy is WAY TOO aggressive and comes into play WAY TOO early for even medium usage users rendering their uncapped account almost useless (even for browsing now it seems, not just P2P). Essentially what Afrihost is saying is that this uncapped offering is only useful for light usage which kinda defeats the whole point of having an uncapped account to begin with.

The reason for this I believe is simple. To reduce the usage of bandwidth the policies kick in to prevent you from taking full advantage of your line speed and achieving your maximum theoretical download total in a month....which Afrihost has worked out is probably not profitable (enough?). Thus instead of charging you for a fixed cap an amount which is sufficiently profitable they instead claim to give you uncapped, but prevent you from using too much and ruining their profit margins. Simple and devious.
 
ajc said:
Wrong! I had no idea that the policies had changed until I wandered back into these forums last night. Their current FUP is not the one that I acknowledged and agreed to on March 27th and they've made no effort to contact me telephonically or via e-mail to inform me of these changes. Personally, I'm not bothered about getting a refund but if the service is going to get lousy once I hit 15GB; I'll go elsewhere.
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Same here. Only learnt of this literally this afternoon when I came to this forum to see if I was not the only one with a slow connection all of a sudden. I think they (probably including the other affected ISP's too) should consider doing away with this "pretend to be uncapped" and rather concentrate on further reducing the pricing per GB. I don't know, I am not an IT expert or know all that involves bandwidth, but this has not gone well as Jeremy Clarkson would say...
 
This whole Afrihost thing is really depressing. Thankfully I haven't gone for the uncapped offering as I'd wondered how the "However, our uncapped service is designed for someone sitting in front of their computer using the internet as much as they want. It is not designed for computer programs that are setup to continuously download 24/7, 30 days a month" would pan out. I really hope they don't fold as they host one of my websites (checks that back up is up to date).

What are the chances of them offering the R14,50/gig top-up this month? 50%, 20%, 1%?

Another thing is that they're still advertising ADSL Uncapped on their website. What are they trying to do!? Afrihost's offering is so heavily throttled it is effectively a capped account, they have got to rename it to something else.

Perhaps they need to go for some kind of a point system or a 10 day (or 5 day or whatever) rolling window. Those who don't "abuse" the system are allowed more leeway or less throttling.

Whatever they do they shouldn't call it uncapped until it really is.

I imagine in a couple of years when uncapped is pretty standard this account would be aimed at moderate users who don't want to be bothered with using 3 gigs one month and 10 gigs the next, and with a few heavy downloaders it is still possible to be profitable. There is no way a small company like Afrihost can afford the bandwidth for 100% heavy p2p/nzb downloaders.
 
On 40GB at the moment and I have dial up speeds. How nice. Http download coming down at 4.5Kbps
 
I complained to Afrihost about my 5k linespeed and this was their response:

Firstly I would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused, there was extreme congestion on the network & as a result, client were experiencing very slow speeds & this was escalated to IS, this has consequently been resolved, what i can suggest is rebooting your router. Please advise if the speeds have also resolved.
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I should reboot him :twisted: :cry:
 
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So I hit 32GB today and this is the result... back to snail speeds
http://www.speedtest.net/result/777199440.png

Signed up with MWB today and will give them a whirl to establish if there is any difference in services.
What has impressed me thus far about MWB is a) good feedback on the forums b) support actually respond to Q's with real A's
I also hear whispers of good thinks to come,.... watch this space.
 
First day with Mweb and I could actually download again... to test I managed a good 9GB over night. Thank you mweb. Afrihost just left a bad taste in my mouth.
 
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