Potential customer - couple of Qs

[minimoog]

Hi

Having nearly reached the end of my tether with Plusnet's appalling speeds I'm casting around looking for another ISP. IDNet seems to have the speed, reliability, and support boxes ticked, but I need some advice on filling in the service gaps as it seems to be fairly, er, streamlined here. I'm a home user, currently doing 15-20 GB transfer per month though that's partly limited by the poor speed which discourages more. The 30GB package should do me.

I find my 250MB webspace to be very useful - can anyone suggest a good value and reliable hosting service? I mainly use the space just for posting pics and sound files on various forums, with the occasional shared document etc. Possibly don't need quite that much space - maybe 150 MB would do.

Also can anyone steer me towards a decent (and hopefully free) non-binary newsgroup service?

Are there any restrictions on using 3rd-party binary news services?

Are there any other non-obvious service gaps I should be taking into consideration?

If I can resolve these issues I might well be on my way across 

Thanks for any help.

[Lance]

Welcome to the forum, minimoog!

Are there any restrictions on using 3rd-party binary news services?

Are there any other non-obvious service gaps I should be taking into consideration?

I'm afraid I can't answer your other questions but I can these ones!

IDNet do not impose any kind of restrictions or port blocking at all so third party news services should work fine.

One thing you may wish to be aware of is that support hours are only on working days, not weekends. Realistically, this shouldn't be a problem because most of us don't have any problems! However, if you find you do have a problem, you won't get any better support than you do from IDNet's support.

[CaptainSlow]

Photobucket.com for image hosting - free - 300mb and even does click and paste [img] tags for most forums.

Google Picassa are now offering 1Gb storage I have been told. That's free too.

They also got Google pages, that's a beta and has 300mb I think it is, free again. very early days, but at least usable.

There is a German UNI that does free text hosting for news, or used to, I can't recall the name off the top, but if it comes to me then I'll post it up.

3RD party with binaries is fine here for me.

If anything else helpful occurs to me I'll post it up as I think of it, or as you mention it.

[wrtpeeps]

i use binary usenet and i always max out my connection on it, so i can say that it has absolutely no restrictions

[William]

I've been a customer of 34SP for six years and currently have three domains and hosting accounts with them.

The basic hosting package costs £17.95 per year. That's per year. Have a look at its features and you will see that it will suit you perfectly.

CS is on a par with IDNet (although without the phone calls and the lovely Miriam) with an active and helpful forum.

[minimoog]

Thanks for the replies folks. William - 34SP do indeed look just the ticket.

Cheers!

[AvengerUK]

I use http://www.vooservers.com very reliable and fast for web space.

As for the others, i have no idea!