My hunt for a nerd friendly ISP has paid off. I was somewhat surprised to find that quite a few Norwegian ISPs actually allow nerds to have small home servers installed on their private internet connection. A few other ISPs didn’t bother to answer my e-mail, for me that’s a good thing since I don’t have to consider them. After some consideration, I’m now leaving a large ISP who don’t like nerds in favor of a smaller one who does. That the guy who replied to my mail with questions about home servers had the quote “Sex, Drugs & Linux Rules - MaDsen Wikholm” in his e-mail signature and that says it all. They’ll even provide me with a static IP for free. Good stuff.

Small can be good, because they tend to care more about their customers, at least all up until the point where they get too many of them. I experienced just that with my first web host and they really started to suck monkey balls. According to people I know who are still with them, they have dug a support hole they can’t quite seem to crawl out of. If my new ISP does a good job, I’ll let you know and I’ll certainly let you know if they suck.

Not only am I changing ISP, I’m also changing technology. I’m moving from cable internet to ASDL2+. According to the ISP this could theoretically give me a massive 25Mbit/s downstream and up to 2Mbit/s upstream, but the problem with ADSL2+ is that the speeds are just that - theory. Everything depends on how far I’m located from the network equipment. It’s also interesting to note that according to Wikipedia, the theoretical maximum downstream is 24Mbit/s, while my new ISP is advertising 25Mbit/s. That said, I probably never would have seen that high speeds anyway, and I would never really need it, but it was a good offer.

I’m that easy to fool.