Citescape
October 28, 2006
I wanted to give a big shout-out to Citescape. We've been using them at $WeMakeLegalResearchSoftware (did you know that I actually get hits off of that?) for four or five months now - and I wanted to talk about how great they are. Now, Jesse (the GM over there) is a regular commenter on my blog - but that doesn't affect me. You all know that I'm more than happy to rant against a corporation / company if they've wronged me (or my company!).
What's so great about them though? There's so much to love.
Number one is that they've got competent caring people staffing their services. Got a problem with their service? A knowledgeable /team/ of techs (well, you know... two) will be sent out to service your request and investigate. What's that mean? someone who understands that you've already ran traceroute and found that things aren't the fault of your own routing system. They won't respond with "If you're not running Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP SP 2 - we won't help you. Reboot your machine, reset the router and don't call us again until tomorrow".
Number two, ISP service. The uptime that we've experienced (since settling with the setup woes, which were quite large - partly to blame for someone severing our wire and partly to blame for an improper estimate of distance on the part of citescape (fixed of course)); but it took some time)... anyway, the uptime is great. Last weekend we experienced our first downtime in months. Hear that Charter customers, months. Nice, eh?
Number three, customer service. When there's a problem, they take care of it. Not only do they send techs (and I mean techs - not some kid fresh out of high-school who thinks that networking consists of plugging cat-5 into a switch) out to fix the problem immediately (within a day) - but if it's a bad problem that's confirmed to be at their fault; they fess up to it and provide a credit. Something that makes the customer feel happy; if the service hasn't been delivered - it's not charged. So simple, yet so often overlooked.
Number four ... and this is one of my personal favorites... no filtering. uPNP is filtered now, due to some recent packet-storm issues... but nothing else. Do you want to host that low-volume HTTP server? Go. Do you want to use BitTorrent and download the latest Linux distribution? Go. They are an Internet Service Provider. Charter is an HTTP servce provider - if you deviate from just downloading porn and the latest G.W. Bush announcements - you'll run into trouble. Not with Citescape. You're free to explore the /rest/ of the internet. You know, the part that your Mom doesn't know about. Things like IRC, FTP, BitTorrent... things that your avg. Joe Footballporn doesn't even know exist. Citescape lets you get to them.
Ok. Enough. If you live in the St. Cloud area, definitely check out Citescape for an ISP. You'll be very glad that you did. I'm proud to say that St. Cloud finally has a real ISP. We're no longer the rural community that we used to be (thanks St. Cloud City Counsel for allowing to be instituted a monopoly on wired internet)!
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6 Comments
| Tagged: StCloud, ISP
Jordan T. Cox 2006/10/28
No, I haven't been payed for this and I'm not employed by Citescape - nor am I even able to get their service at home (it is based on Line of Sight - and I face Becker, the destitute land of idiots and farmers). I just wanted to promote a /really great/ ISP here in St. Cloud.
david 2006/10/29
Nice write-up Jordan. I agree 100%. Another thing that is not ordinary for an ISP - they support the Mac OS X environment. When they first came over to my place they actually seemed relieved to see a Mac :)
Big-ups to citEscape. A+
Jordan T. Cox 2006/10/29
Yes, I adore the fact that they are willing to work with other operating systems. We were using an OpenBSD router at work - and they were perfectly fine with it.
Jesse 2006/10/29
I am here to confirm that I have not paid for this awesome post. However, thank you tons Jordan for the compliments. Thanks also to David. You guys sure make my job worthwhile with comments like these.
Jesse 2006/10/30
What is with all of the "Hates" anyway?
Jordan T. Cox 2006/10/30
I really don't know. I think that people just randomly click it, or maybe it's even the result of a prefetcher. I'm contemplating removing it and simply leaving the "Like" button.