Small ISPs Provide Top-Notch Support, Quality Of Service

But before choosing an ISP for themselves or their customers, solution providers should take a number of factors into consideration: the quantity of traffic generated each month, the level of customer support needed, the amount of Web space required, whether script support is needed, whether e-mail support is needed and what the cost will be.

Once those questions are answered,which is only the tip of the iceberg,a variety of choices are available. The ISP marketplace is awash with companies large and small peddling a dizzying array of services at diverse prices.

For example, Yahoo offers 25 e-mail addresses, 100 Mbytes of storage, 25 Gybtes of data transfer and 24x7 toll-free customer support for $19.95 per month and a onetime setup fee of $25. Earthlink charges about $19.95 per month for a similar package and throws in an additional 100 Mbytes of storage and five more e-mail accounts. The same service would from Interwrx, a small ISP in Mesa, Ariz., would run approximately $69 per month with a $49.95 setup fee.

But the higher prices charged by small ISPs often come with higher-touch service.

"I moved from a top-tier ISP to Interwrx because of the quality of service I was receiving from them," said Wade Harding, CTO of Barrett Jackson (www.barrettjackson.com), a midsize, privately owned business in Scottsdale, Ariz. "They were a little more expensive, but now I get the flexibility of a small company and the security of a large company."

Net Access, a small ISP in Parsippany, N.J., offers the same range of services mentioned above but for about $50 per month with no setup fee. As a dedicated ISP, Net Access offers simple shared hosting (ranging from $10 to $100 per month); dedicated servers (starting at $99 per month); and co-location, the most advanced level of hosting service, through which customers lease space at the co-location facility for their Web servers (priced from $100 per month). Net Access' co-location facility offers extended power-backup capability, climate control and a staff that is on call 24x7 to reboot servers or change configurations, if necessary.

"With this combination of superior network and service, we are able to provide a high-quality regional network on par with the national networks, while still providing our customers with all the advantages of a local company," said Blake Ellman, CEO of Net Access.

Solution providers should also beware of discount hosting companies, whose prices are ideal but whose service often isn't.

"The one thing that you should realize about these discount hosting companies [is] you get what you pay for," said Scott Sampson, COO of Interwrx. "I see a lot more of the $9.95 [per month] hosting companies that we compete with, and we'll lose a customer here and there to them because of the price, but sooner or later they come back. %85 It usually comes down to service and support," Sampson said. "One of the hosting companies that our client moved over to,he was there for three months before coming back. He said that it was fine for the first two months, then in the third month his site went down. He tried calling technical support and no one answered; he e-mailed them and didn't get a response until four days later. They said they were having some problems and it would be resolved quickly. A week later, he moved his site back to us."

Companies looking for an ISP can take the easy road and jump aboard one of the big dogs or discount shops; however, if it's quality of service they're looking for, a small ISP might be the ticket. Using the Internet to access lots of data quickly is becoming the norm in today's business environment, so choosing an ISP that offers world-class customer service along with network redundancy and scalability is the only way to move upstream.