Your favorite ISP?

[mattlistener]

This would be a good occasion to ask everyone: what's your favorite Boston-area ISP? All I care about is a shell account and reliable email. I'm still on World, which did get reliable again after driving most suspoids away, but maybe it's time for me to go too.

Comments

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

My favorite is signs.portents.com.

I hear they have even installed the latest version of nethack.

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

:-) True, true... I wonder if I could get them to install mh?

[arfur]

do you need dial-up connectivity too? If you don't, I wholeheartedly recommend NetSpace.

Disclosure: that's where my account is; it grew out of a project at Brown; I'm friends with a few of the admins and other folks on the board. :-)

[zmook.livejournal.com]

MH? Wow. You're even more old-school than me -- I routinely use mutt, myself. Why MH?

As for ISP, I use RCN. They've been good.

[bitty.livejournal.com]

P-A-N-I-X.

[beowabbit]

If you don't need dialup (just a shell account), I'd be happy to give you an aq.org account. My net's been slightly flaky lately, though (brief outages that I usually don't notice, but that occasionally merit calling my ISP).

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Is your caps-with-hyphens response there an expression of extremely high endorsement? Why do you like them?

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Why mh? Because my geek job is basically all command line. I like doing everything from the command line. I did consider using pine, but couldn't stand the wait to edit with emacs, and wanted more control over headers.

[bitty.livejournal.com]

panix is not only a reliable shell account, it's run by incredibly cool people :)
IANAG, however, so i couldn't really give you the details as to why they're better or worse than x, y, or z provider.

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Ok, here's a key question, which I can't judge from their website. Do you do email from their shell account? Is their server response time good enough that you can compose message online without much pain?

Thanks!

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Jay! I'm going to stay focused on the institutional providers for now, because there's a lot of features I'm looking for in a shell account. (screen, mh, procmail, spamassassin, web, 150MB of disk)

The offer makes me happy though! :-)

[bitty.livejournal.com]

I do all but the incredibly long, deep e-mails in immediate time. (My drafting of incredibly long e-mails separately is a holdover from dial-up days. Plus, I can edit them that way.)
I do 99.9% of my e-mail from their shell account (the remaining .1% being the rare photo that I open elsewhere).

I haven't really had much trouble. I think there's only been one time since I've started using panix that they've had problems. Oh, and the big blackout last month affected them, but that's 'cause they're NYC-based.