I have been using Astraweb for over a year now as my Usenet provider.. Speeds have been great.. I always max out at 2.07MB/s which is the max speed of my Internet.. I have never experienced a downtime with Astraweb and they offer SSL connections! They offer many packages but really the DSL Special is all you need.. No speed limit, no transfer limit, ssl support, US/EU servers, 20 connections and 688day retention which is growing daily! At $11.00USD/month you really cant go wrong.. Beats Netflix for me..

Just my 2 cents..

So Just thought I would post a follow up..

I have been using Gomez Peer Zone trouble free for almost 2 years now.. I signed up in December of 2008 and have been using it on all my computers since.. There has been a few months which i didnt make the payout minimum ($5.00) but those were months when i had most of my stuff in storage or was moving or was not near a computer very long.. But the balance has always rolled over to the following month. As of this moment my total earnings from Gomez Peer is..

Lifetime Earnings: $71.96
Current Account Balance: $4.00
Earnings Close Date: 2010/07/31

Gomez though has been late at making payments sometimes has always come through with payments.. I have tested the client on the following OS’s WinXP (SP0,SP1,SP2,SP3)/Vista (32/64bit)/Win7 (32/64bit)/Server 2003/Server 2008 and seems to run just fine taking little to no resources.. Does not cause any issues on the servers i have it running on, and does not inter-fear with my movies or games on my desktop

Just thought I would pass on some peace of mind about the software..

So having several Computer, servers and VirtualMachines running at my house I was wishing there was a way to earn some money with them even if  its pocket change (hey free lunch would be nice right?)

I found GomezPeer which seams to work out well for what I wanted.. you install a Java based client and just let it run while your on your computer. I have been running for about 6months now and made payout (and paid) each month and with 5 computers I make about 5.00-6.00/USD a month.. Neat thing about this is you don’t really need to use the computer a lot, while running it on a computer you use alot seams to be a added benefit it seams to run fine on idle PC’s or rarely used PC’s. You are not limited to how many computer you install too using your single account (they actually encourage installing to more than one computer).

The only issue I have seen with this is people seam to have varried wait times to get their accounts approved.. Once you sign up you need to install the application and let it run. It took just under 2 1/2 weeks for my account to be approved but i have heard of accounts taking upward of 2months for approval.

GomezPeer Zone

Just a quickie Review, Saw this baby on DealExtreme I picked up a few of these on ebay a few months back they work great even on newer servers. I use these all the time in my Labs at work.

Great Price on DealExtreme right now $2.59 each free shipping!

So I went to Order a LCD Picture frame for a Christmas present.  Found a cheap one on eCost.com and figured while I was getting the frame might as well get an SD card for it as well..  So I do the checkout and everything looks good confirmed that both items were in stock so I could get them quickly.. Few min later I got my email confirmation of my order.. And there was a 3rd Item that was added to the list.. "CAWRA" note this was listed as a line item not down by the tax and subtotals. Called up eCost to ask what that was all about.. The guy that answered was from India and it was nearly impossible to understand anything he was saying, and I’m use to talking to people from India as I deal with people from their daily. He had no Idea what the line item was and had no answers for me, I requested a Cancelation and Refund. About an hour and half later I still didn’t have my email confirmation that the order was canceled. Checked the order status on the site and it was still processing. Called eCost again and got another person from India but this time it was a woman with a clearer voice. Asked her what was up with the order, She immediately was able to tell me that the "CAEWRA" was for the "California  State Recycling Fee" oh ok that makes sense I’m use to seeing that on my receipts from OfficeDepot and BestBuy.. But she couldn’t explain how it moved from the bottom under the subtotal like it shows on the site, to being a line item on the email..  Next issue I noticed that my SD card was on backorder and she confirmed this, and I got mad cus it said it was in stock on the site.. I asked about the order status and she confirmed it was processing normally, I informed her that was supposed to be canceled and she changed it to Canceled. 5min later I got my confirmation email that my order was canceled.

Moral: Dont trust the item status on the site.. Watch line items on your order confirmations.. If you need to cancel an order call More than once to make sure it was canceled. BTW takes 24-72hours to get a refund if your card was already billed.

Since I don’t like my orders being changed around, or having to wait for stuff that’s on backorder after ordering it because it said it was in stock and because I can’t trust that canceled orders will really be canceled.

I will no longer do business with eCost.com

I finally got a hold of someone on the online chat at Voipgo after trying nearly nonstop for days. The first support agent was rude to me and then closed the session in mid conversation. Sat on Q for another 20min and got to talk to a second agent this one a lot more polite. But was told I have to send an email to a second email address to get refunded and services turned off and that it would take a few days to get response on that. I was heated at this point and requested to talk to someone in management which he was unable to connect me to and said that they wouldn’t call me after I requested it. So finely I sent an email to that second address and told them how unhappy I was with both service and support. Requested refund for last 2 months (in which time I made a total of 1 successful crappy quality call) And warned them that if they do not respond quickly I will be contacting both my Bank and the Better Business Bureau.

*Note: Something that Voipgo will continue to deny up and down is you will get charge a foreign transaction fee by most bank and credit companies. So my $17.95/month was actually $17.95 + 0.52 = $18.47

So back in May of this year I was shopping around for VoIP services, I didn’t really have the need for it but thought it would be nice to have a phone at home as all I had was a cell phone at the time. After shopping around and talking to the various company’s that offer VoIP services I picked Voipgo .

First Impression
At first the service was great, had a few minor issues but they were dealt with quickly.. Calls were clear and there was no delays in the calls. Support was a pleasure to talk to and easy to get a hold of. This lasted for about 2 weeks..

Headache
I got 2 calls one day on the 3rd week from my dad and my girlfriend saying that calls to my Voip phone was not connecting or the phone would just ring forever during which time my phone would never ring.. Contacted support about the issue and they said it was fixed… I played tag with Support on this issue on and off for about a month, having the issue at lest 2-3 times a week..

After the first month of service call quality started degrading to the point that you couldn’t understand what I was saying on the phone. During this time there would be high peaks in delay in the call (say something and the other end wouldn’t hear it for about 5-10seconds). Then during the call audio started to *disappear* would say a whole sentence "Hey its hot here, hows the weather where your at?" and they would hear "Hey its .. here, …… weather …. your.." c’mon how do you have a decent conversation with that kind of phone clarity..  I contacted support countless times on this issue..

Then in July I had them move my service to a new server they put up in hopes to have some what better services.. Well I was sorely mistaken on that, things went from bad to worse. Server was down all the time, reset several times, and none of my current issues were resolved to top it off. Support was suddenly nearly impossible to get a hold of.

Enough Is Enough
ok so after finally getting fed up with my services I sent in a very heated email with priority set to high to Voipgo support on July 17, 2008.. Yesterday July 31, 2008 I *still* had not a single response to that email. I called support after work only to sit on hold for 25min and hang-up, then sat on hold for online support for 80min only to get a message that operator closed my session and refresh the page and support has been closed (offline) since. Now it is Aug 1, 2008 and I have observed Online support to be offline all day. When I call in there’s a message about experiencing high call volume and get placed on hold indefinitely. I will be giving them until Monday afternoon to give response or I will be debating legal taking action against them as its impossible to even cancel service.

Will post update.

Ok.. So I had a dedicated server for a few years hosted by ZipServers.com.. Boy was that a nightmare from day one.. I got stuck with this host for reasons out of my control (no not a contract) for nearly 2 years.. Well just a nice run down on why this company sucked.. When I ordered my server.. Not only did it take nearly twice as long as longest expected date. The partitioning of the drives (Linux OS) was un-uniform to any standard and I had to request it reloaded with a default partitioning to make it even usable. A few months later there was a network down (their main site wasn’t even reachable..) When I contacted support they *rebooted* my server then I was able to access it about 15min later, oddly rebooting *my* server made their website reachable as well at that time. Later I noticed my Invoices as well as Newsletters were 100% unreadable in Gmail .. (To this day I still have no idea what was actually said or shown in a real newsletter) I told support countless times of this issue and always got response of "oh its been fixed" or if I was in web chat a common one was *Support Chat has left the chat conversation*. Later on I noticed an on going trend when talking to web chat support… "that is not my department please email support" seriously.. the web chat support is insufficient I have never once had my questions answered by them.. The ticket system is a joke.. Tickets I submit would be answered in random order. High priority tickets seamed no higher priority then tickets marked as Low priority.

I got contacted va email one day about 4 months *AFTER* I had officially canceled my account (Canceled va phone and email) Stating I have an outstanding balance for the current month.. Call them up and chewed them out. They had no idea why I was in the Auto mailer still..

Got an Email newsletter today (this is what caused me to blog all this).. Again un-readable.. And.. I haven’t even been a client of Zipservers in nearly a year how the heck did i suddenly get stuck on the mailing list again after nearly a year? I confronted web chat about the issue and they told me to contact abuse@zipservers.com I got pissed and yelled at them then they closed the chat. So I forwarded the newsletter email back to abuse as well as Admin@ZipServers.com got a response about 25min later from admin that I had been removed.

Admin Response email:
I have removed you from the list. Have a nice day.
Regards,
Admin

Oh and heres the log with web chat..

You are now chatting with Support Chat

Support Chat: Thank you for contacting ZipServers Live Support. Can I have your ticket number so I can further assist you today?
Me: No you cant because i dont have one
Me: Im making a compliant
Me: I just got a news letter email from you guys
Me: I have not been a client of your for almost half a year
Me: and for the last time.. your emails are 100% unreadable in Gmail i told you guys about this the whole 2 years i was with you.. your service sucks and you dont even listen to your clients
Support Chat: You can emails us this complaint at abuse@zipsupport.com
Me: LIKE HELL!
Me: I BEEN THROUGH THIS CRAP MORE THEN ONCE ALREADY!
Me: DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Support Chat has left the chat conversation

All in all my experiences with Zipservers was below standard for me and I would not recommend anyone to Zipservers.com