Official Afrihost Q&A Thread

[bboy]

Gian,

Thanks for responding. Instead of categorizing through amount of cap used why don't you simply make it 200GB international, completely uncapped and unthrottled local (Most people that perform heavy downloads are happy with local only bandwidth) and then rate limit to 384KBps once they hit the 200GB. Judging from the comments in the other forum topic it has become evident that MOST would be happy to have access to 120 to 200GB (mostly sub 120GB of avg usage was mentioned) You could even do the same as Mweb and shape certain ports dramatically during the day and ease up on the shaping at night) This will leave time for work and play as there are very few people who use their internet connections purely for play. Some of us really do NOT want to leave Afrihost and personally I do believe this is all manageable. As long as the right expectation is set as you have done above and communicated thoroughly.

I know for myself that I have averaged between 100 and 120GB per month for the last year. Of this estimated usage for personal (streaming youtube, gaming, episodes etc) have made up only about 20 to 25% of my total traffic. Some of the more heavy users are generally in IT related jobs and the more you support their needs the more they will support you. By word of mouth advertising and such you will increase your revenue. Ask any IT person regardless of the role he performs how many times he has been asked the question (which ISP should I use and what package should I get). We always get asked (because we are in IT )

Just a thought - use it don't use it.

P.S. I have worked for an institution where we had to limit traffic use significantly. If you would like to know the measures that we used to fully utilize our bandwidth while keeping everyone happy you are welcome to PM me and I will answer any questions you have.

This won't work, once you impose a limit the user will have a "target" to hit, how many times with our old capped accounts havent we all just downloaded at the end of the month to make sure we finish our bandwidth we paid for?

 

[warchylde]

You have had the affirmative-action type thought process from last night, and have been VERY childish in my eyes.

Are you one of the guys that used to use the R29/GB accounts?

If so, you should know that the guys from Afrihost have been trying to get us a more affordable solution from the start, and you shouldn't have cried like a little fat girl whose cake was stolen from last night.

You should go to MWEB (I can guarantee with 98% certainty that you will run into the same issues there, the ONLY reason Afrihost started this earlier is because they are more effective than MWEB....)

I sincerely hope that whenever you're even slightly off timing with any important project you work on in your life, you're scrutinized as badly as you have been doing Afrihost the past 24 hours.... Did you ever read in their T&C that the account is still in testing? Because clearly your behavior from the start towards them have been very hostile.

A warning to all the other idiots out there (Supamansa comes to mind): These uncapped accounts will be unsustainable if you keep trying to rape the account, rather than thinking of your neighbor as well. Spread out the 1000GB of (illegal) downloads you want to do over a 6 month period, you won't use all that data immediately anyway.

I have to salute Afrihost for acting in the best interest of the ordinary Joe's out there.
The 1TB/month (most likely pr0n watching) losers can buy R2500 accounts, ,as even at that rate, it comes down to R2.50/GB, which is a give-away IMO.

I also have to add, that when you advertise your account ass uncapped, you should probably also put an asterisk with some T&C in it, as our current usage resembles people going to the Panarotti's eat-as-much-as-you-can pizza special, and trying to eat about 200 slices....

I fully understand that you'll be able to lift the 60GB to 100GB or even 200GB once the high-end users get over it.

I'll support you okes, from start to finish, because you can make sense out of SA's Internet situation, unlike most of the guys posting in the "ADSL ISP discussions" forum..

Why is it that everyone ALWAYS assume that the content is illegal.

Is youtube illegal?
Are the opensuse, redhat/fedora/centos/trixbox/ubuntu/gentoo/vmware esxi packages illegal
Is setting up a WSUS environment to test functionality for your clients illegal
Is downloading ISO's from microsoft (package subscribers with no media which seems to be the norm now) illegal?
Is downloading Trial MS iso's for testing illegal?

Catch a wake-up just because you are limited to downloading your soaps and tunes doesn't mean that everyone is doing that. 4GB/day is NOT that much.

 

[ajules]

Thanks Gian for clearing everything up. It's still a good deal if you do about 40 - 60 gb a month and don't mind a bit of port shaping (only past 30gb). Works out to under R9 And I am confident that that threshold will increase in the next months to come. So good things on the horizon.

Couldn't agree more - this is still an excellent deal for my needs

Thank you Afrihost - you made a bit of a mess of things but you guys are still No.1 in my books

 

[Johand]

\\

I unfortunately can use more than 60GB in a month without even touching torrents or newsgroups... Doing SQL reporting and testing and stuff chews through bandwidth... and having a vaguely smart house also doesn't help the bandwidth usage.

Err.. dude - I think you might be doing something wrong. Unless of course you run a BI/BW/Reporting tool remotely which requires all the data to be downloaded repeatedly (err... this also counts as doing something wrong). Don't move data long distances - even if you have the bandwidth Of course I would be very interested in WHAT you are actually doing.

 

[fonoi]

That's not true - when I hit 30GB my connection was throttled so badly my skype wouldn't sign in and my VOIP office phone wouldn't work. My connection was throttled down to dial up speeds.

You may be correct here, as Gian siad they made a mistake and hit the STOP button, next month the throttling wont be as severe as quickly.

 

[Degaron]

HI there im quite happy with the service that afrihost has given, just want to know what the restrictions for the 384 accounts are if there are any.

 

[killadoob]

Telkom ipc pricing, as well as seacoms pricing is common knowledge. Those two things alone give us all we need to know.

So then break it down for me please.

If i download 100gb a month is mweb making a loss and why would mweb want to sign up thousands of people only to make a loss? Logically that makes little to no sense in my mind.

 

[warchylde]

This won't work, once you impose a limit the user will have a "target" to hit, how many times with our old capped accounts havent we all just downloaded at the end of the month to make sure we finish our bandwidth we paid for?

agreed. This was just an example of the various options available.

 

[froot]

Err.. dude - I think you might be doing something wrong. Unless of course you run a BI/BW/Reporting tool remotely which requires all the data to be downloaded repeatedly (err... this also counts as doing something wrong). Don't move data long distances - even if you have the bandwidth Of course I would be very interested in WHAT you are actually doing.

A friend of mine doing SQL reporting moves through reports totalling 2-5GB in size..... it's not that hard

 

[Maestr0]

Oh well, guess this isn't for me then either. Will cancel it and give someone else a try.

 

[Tjoker]

What he said.....

@xrapidx

You have had the affirmative-action type thought process from last night, and have been VERY childish in my eyes.

Are you one of the guys that used to use the R29/GB accounts?

If so, you should know that the guys from Afrihost have been trying to get us a more affordable solution from the start, and you shouldn't have cried like a little fat girl whose cake was stolen from last night.

You should go to MWEB (I can guarantee with 98% certainty that you will run into the same issues there, the ONLY reason Afrihost started this earlier is because they are more effective than MWEB....)

I sincerely hope that whenever you're even slightly off timing with any important project you work on in your life, you're scrutinized as badly as you have been doing Afrihost the past 24 hours.... Did you ever read in their T&C that the account is still in testing? Because clearly your behavior from the start towards them have been very hostile.

A warning to all the other idiots out there (Supamansa comes to mind): These uncapped accounts will be unsustainable if you keep trying to rape the account, rather than thinking of your neighbor as well. Spread out the 1000GB of (illegal) downloads you want to do over a 6 month period, you won't use all that data immediately anyway.

I have to salute Afrihost for acting in the best interest of the ordinary Joe's out there.
The 1TB/month (most likely pr0n watching) losers can buy R2500 accounts, ,as even at that rate, it comes down to R2.50/GB, which is a give-away IMO.

I also have to add, that when you advertise your account ass uncapped, you should probably also put an asterisk with some T&C in it, as our current usage resembles people going to the Panarotti's eat-as-much-as-you-can pizza special, and trying to eat about 200 slices....

I fully understand that you'll be able to lift the 60GB to 100GB or even 200GB once the high-end users get over it.

I'll support you okes, from start to finish, because you can make sense out of SA's Internet situation, unlike most of the guys posting in the "ADSL ISP discussions" forum..

 

[ToxicBunny]

Err.. dude - I think you might be doing something wrong. Unless of course you run a BI/BW/Reporting tool remotely which requires all the data to be downloaded repeatedly (err... this also counts as doing something wrong). Don't move data long distances - even if you have the bandwidth Of course I would be very interested in WHAT you are actually doing.

I have a relatively low-end sql server in a web farm at this point in time..... but thats but one aspect of the whole thing.... i need to pull down a copy of the DB every week or so for other reasons... as well as load testing the site...

As for running BI reports and stuff remotely, yes at the moment I am simply due to the way things are setup but once it goes full production that obviously won't be the case.

What i'm doing with that specific site is not open for the public.. but suffice it to say, that one site (when I work on it) can account for 20 - 40gbs of bandwidth without too much effort.

 

[fonoi]

Why is it that everyone ALWAYS assume that the content is illegal.

Is youtube illegal?
Are the opensuse, redhat/fedora/centos/trixbox/ubuntu/gentoo/vmware esxi packages illegal
Is setting up a WSUS environment to test functionality for your clients illegal
Is downloading ISO's from microsoft (package subscribers with no media which seems to be the norm now) illegal?
Is downloading Trial MS iso's for testing illegal?

Catch a wake-up just because you are limited to downloading your soaps and tunes doesn't mean that everyone is doing that. 4GB/day is NOT that much.

No that would not be illegal, but this account would not be for you.

 

[warchylde]

You may be correct here, as Gian siad they made a mistake and hit the STOP button, next month the throttling wont be as severe as quickly.

As long as I can keep working I am happy. I don't give a rats behind for torrents and the like. I do use newsgroups for grabbing some of my ISO's because it's generally faster that way (when I am working on a test system in the middle of the night I REALLY DON"T want to wait for it to come down at 40KB/s which seems to be the rate MS has set for authorised soft ISO's to come down.

 

[submethod]

A friend of mine doing SQL reporting moves through reports totalling 2-5GB in size..... it's not that hard

I'm a developer working mainly from home and I do the same! Database dumps, download software patches etc. It all adds up...

 

[froot]

Oh well, guess this isn't for me then either. Will cancel it and give someone else a try.

I bought an account from someone at != Afrihost and got throttled (throttled ie no torrents or news servers working for 90% of the 24h cycle) at 3GB and believe me, Afrihost can only be better

 

[killadoob]

You should go to MWEB (I can guarantee with 98% certainty that you will run into the same issues there, the ONLY reason Afrihost started this earlier is because they are more effective than MWEB....)

Interesting that mweb have had this offer out for longer than afrihost and nothing like this has happened, it took afrihost very little time to implement their 30gb / dial up uncapped accounts. No wonder the SA public gets so screwed over because people actually put up with this shyte.

 

[fonoi]

I have a relatively low-end sql server in a web farm at this point in time..... but thats but one aspect of the whole thing.... i need to pull down a copy of the DB every week or so for other reasons... as well as load testing the site...

As for running BI reports and stuff remotely, yes at the moment I am simply due to the way things are setup but once it goes full production that obviously won't be the case.

What i'm doing with that specific site is not open for the public.. but suffice it to say, that one site (when I work on it) can account for 20 - 40gbs of bandwidth without too much effort.

Get a suitable business account.

 

[fonoi]

As long as I can keep working I am happy. I don't give a rats behind for torrents and the like. I do use newsgroups for grabbing some of my ISO's because it's generally faster that way (when I am working on a test system in the middle of the night I REALLY DON"T want to wait for it to come down at 40KB/s which seems to be the rate MS has set for authorised soft ISO's to come down.

As above "Get a suitable business account"

 

[froot]

Get a suitable business account.

That's not the issue at hand. We have simply been stating that one can hit >30GB a month on perfectly legit data without really trying.