Recommend me....An ISP for my business

Well as you all helped so much with my printer dilemma, I will now seek your help in selecting an ISP for my company.

We do not use a massive amount of bandwidth but we do surf the web a bit as well as run a couple of programs that we need to link to another site sometimes along, along with having a couple of company's that need to dial in to sort our technical problems out.

I have a short list but can't really decide between them and have little knowledge of them as I have only used Orange (will never use again!), Be or Virgin at home.

We do not have Cable available to us on the estate and I already have a BT line installed for this purpose so can't switch phone lines to another supplier.

Reliability is probably the most important factor, followed by usage allowance, data management and then price.

The short list is:

Eclipse Business Bronze.£19.95 with 50GB usage
BT Business..................£14 for unlimited usage.
PlusNet........................£11.49 with 60GB usage.

Our internet here is very slow and usually sits at about 1.5Mbps and I don't even think the local exchange has been upgraded to ADSL2 yet! I have witnessed it as high as 2Mbps but then I have also seen it as low as 0.2Mbps. Our current supplier is Daisy (Terrible support and customer service) and this line will be as well as the current daisy supplier with a view to switching the daisy line as well once our contract has run out.

Who would you recommend from the short list and who would you recommend when I switch from Daisy. I want to keep 2 different ISP's so that if I have a fault with one ISP then I will still have internet provided by the second ISP.

Regards

I'd say plusnet but to be honest I doubt you'll see any difference in speed between them. At 2meg you wouldnt see much (if any) improvement even on ADSL2.

As for running two ISP's, chances are they both rent BT wholesale equipment anyway so it may not make a difference if the backhaul has issues.

Eclipse has also been added to the short list as these came recommended from our IT guys!

Well Plusnet have the benefit that they support 24x7, will use email or phone.
On the downside, they don't offer much in terms of data allowance (which is why I'm moving away from them) and that won't change - they're only interested in the low hanging fruit - Grannies who send one email a week and look at the home page of the WI.
I'd consider very carefully how much data you use, and if someone was to do something that used a lot of data (even unknowingly), what would happen to your service and hence your business.

If you do decide to use PlusNet, PM me for my PlusNet user details and I'll take the referral fee!

Surely 50 or 60GB should be sufficient. We use a program to contact Renault for parts searches or warranty stuff and there's a little bit of surfing goes on (mainly by me and my brother) and a tiny amount of eBay selling and that to some remote access and emailing and that's about it.

Yes, if you just do that and don't both watch Youtube vids, stream high quality music etc, I'd have thought it would be enough.
But if someone does do something accidentally - maybe leaving a browser open (or just headless) on Youtube overnight, you might find you're in a pickle. Having said that, I'd hope that if it was seen to be accidental and not a frequent occurrence a decent ISP would be fine about it.

The occasional youtube vid gets watched but it takes so long to buffer we dont usually bother! For this reason streaming anything is a no-no. I will keep it in mind though.

Regards

[joshwalker094]

I'd say bt,well known company, cheap and unlimited

I've not heard too much good said about BT to be honest, especially their bog standard broadband.

[SoulKiss]

Be, its who I use at home and used it at the last job.

Decent Price and while their support is done out of Eastern Europe, any time I had to use them they were great (talking as someone who has been on the network support team of an ISP)