Consumer Reports gives Verizon DSL high marks

In this month's Consumer Reports, Verizon DSL ranks #1 in the DSL Internet Service category. Way to go Verizon!

The rankings were based upon price, speed, reliability, and tech support.

Testing out new blogger.com - Verizon FTP connection...

Does it work? Let's hope so, I love this new blogger.com!

Blogger

I use Blogger.com to publish several different blogs, but some of them require word verification. Its actually pretty annoying, and a compelling reason not to use blogger. Anyone know why it is there on some blogs, but not others?

Informed Hosting

There are a zillion hosting websites out there, but this one is different because the published is only providing reviews of hosting companies that they have done business with.

Informed Hosting

FIOS Deal

If I could get FIOS, I would snap up this deal:

$100 Reward Card for FIOS

Does a domain name matter?

In thinking about search engine optimization, search engine indexing, and the price of web hosting, I can't help but wonder about the impact of domain names, IP numbers, and whois registration information.

For example, does this blog, which gets published to Verizon's "mypages" sub-domain, have a better or worse chance of getting indexed, getting ranked, and making an impact on the web than a page that gets hosted on a static IP, without any other domain names there, and with a private registration? Does any of that matter? Is it ALL based upon content and link structures?

Where is FIOS??

Speaking of broadband speeds, where the heck is FIOS?? I've been waiting for so long! For those who don't know, FIOS is "fiber optics", and means much faster connectivity throughput. I've heard that Verizon's DNS servers are still a little slow on it.

Verizon Customer Service

One complaint about my Verizon DSL service is their customer service. I emailed them over two weeks ago about UPGRADING my service and they have yet to respond. Right now I'm at the $20 / month dry-loop "naked" dsl service level, and would consider upgrading, but I can't seem to find what they other packages and their costs are.

Let me take another look. I remember I first found out about the package through Yahoo, so I checked it out again and they did have some prices. It looks like I can get 3.0 Mbps downstream for $29.00 / month. I think I'll stick with what I have for now. I'd love to figure out a way to improve the latency though, maybe a Squid proxy cache server would help...

Verizon DNS

While I love my Verizon DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), the DNS (domain name server) is pretty slow.

Verizon Domain Name Server IP Addresses

• 4.2.2.1


• 4.2.2.2


• 4.2.2.3


• 4.2.2.4


• 4.2.2.5

Its pretty cool that Verizon pretty much let's everyone on the internet use these servers. But that, and probably some other technical factors, make them slow. In other words, they have high latency.

To remedy this, there are a couple of things you can do. You can run a DNS cache, but that's only helpful if you have many clients on your local area network. You can also use a different DNS server IP, but that can be dangerous, as the server could steer you to the wrong site for a domain name.

I think you can also host a real domain server, which is more complex, obviously. How this might help, I'm not exactly sure, but I think it would.

Verizon DSL Blogger account setup

So here's how I did it. This might not be the best explanation so if you have a question just add a comment and I'll respond as soon as I can.

1. Login to your Verizon DSL account.
2. Setup "My web space", make note of the ftp username and password, you'll need these for blogger.
3. Setup blogger.com account.
4. When deciding where to publish the site, point blogger to your Verizon DSL ftp server.
5. Supply the username and password you noted earlier.
6. Good to go!

Pretty easy huh? Why do it this way? Good question, I guess because you can?

:-)

Verizon DSL

Why do I like Verizon DSL? I like it because of the price. We've got it setup as a dry loop customer, meaning we don't have voice on the line. We have VOIP, yes we have VOIP! Its a good price.

We use Galaxy Voice with Asterisk (Telecomrebirth.com), and its fine for most purposes. My wife and I both have cell phones, so it isn't super important.

At my office though, we use Comcast Workplace (Informedbanking.com). Its pretty good, but expensive.

Flat HTML files

The interesting thing about blogger is that it writes out the blog entries to flat html files. How does this help? Well for one thing, it likely boosts performance. The downside is that you can't truly have dynamic files, and it takes longer to "publish".

Testing 1, 2, 3

Hello?