Daily del.icio.us for May 14th through May 21st

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Holy Bandwidth – Take 3

I just upgraded my existing Road Runner turbo connection to their Business Class service and I now have 15Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream along with QOS to give my packets priority over the rest of the regular Roadrunner customers.

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Prior to this upgrade, I was getting 15Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and so the extra Mbps of upstream is nice but I can really tell the difference in the QOS. I did a speed test to a server in Chicago and then to another server in San Francisco and didn’t notice any drop in speed or overall bandwidth. Prior to business class Road Runner, there was significant drop-off in speed as you traveled further away from my location.

Holy Bandwidth – Take 3

I just upgraded my existing Road Runner turbo connection to their Business Class service and I now have 15Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream along with QOS to give my packets priority over the rest of the regular Roadrunner customers.

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Prior to this upgrade, I was getting 15Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and so the extra Mbps of upstream is nice but I can really tell the difference in the QOS. I did a speed test to a server in Chicago and then to another server in San Francisco and didn’t notice any drop in speed or overall bandwidth. Prior to business class Road Runner, there was significant drop-off in speed as you traveled further away from my location. Next step – static IP and then I can put the Linux boxes at home to good use 🙂

Road Runner vs. U-verse

I am one of those people who hate Time Warner (because of the crappy and recently unreliable service) that can’t wait for Verizon FOIS or AT&T U-verse or anything faster to show up in my neighborhood. My dream Internet provider for home would be what people in Europe have – 50Mbps connections but I’ll settle for Verizon’s Faster Plus services that claims to provide 15 Mbps download and 15 Mbps upload. But Verizon is slowly rolling this out and I am not going to get this for a couple of years. AT&T U-verse is my only salvation as they are slowly offering service in my neighborhood and their Max plan would work for me. U-verse Max offers 10 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload and that would just rock but Time Warner has been upping their game in terms of broadband speed (not service or reliability, mind you) and I am currently getting 15Mbsp download and 1Mbps upload.

Bandwidth Test

I just did a bandwidth test and discovered that I am truly getting close to 1 Mbps upstream and that’s pretty awesome as I use Mozy for my remote backup and I also use Rsync and Subversion to backup my code and other essentials files to my remote (Linux) server. My current thought is to get the AT&T U-verse service and run it side-by-side with my Road Runner connection for a while and see which one is consistently reliable and faster. I sure hope its AT&T as I would like nothing better than to dump Time Warner.

If you’re not using Mozy (or another online backup provider), you should consider getting one!

Daily del.icio.us for January 6th

  • Official Google Docs Blog: New features for 2008! – It’s been two months since we launched Google Presentations and already we’ve got new toys! We’ve been listening to your feedback and working hard to get you new features as quickly as possible
  • Amazon Web Services Blog: Increasing Amazon S3 Data Transfer Performance – The Amazon S3 team is now beta-testing support for an important low-level networking feature which has the potential to significantly increase the performance of large data transfers to and from S3, particularly (but not limited to) for long distance data
  • Blueprint Grid CSS Generator – This tool will help you generate more flexible versions of Blueprint’s grid.css and compressed.css and grid.png files. Whether you prefer 8, 10,16 or 24 columns in your design, this generator now enables you that flexibility with Blueprint.
  • The Most Hated Company In the PC Industry – Asustek is the most hated company in the industry. Microsoft, Apple, Dell and Palm hate Asustek because the company can give us something they can’t: A super cheap, flexible, powerful mobile computer. At $299, why would anyone not buy one?

Goodbye Carbonite – Hello Mozy

I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I’ve found Mozy. I’ve had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it’s better to lose $80.00 than all your data.

Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that’s where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.

One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept – I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don’t really throttle your bandwidth after you’ve uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn’t seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.

Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.

So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.

Daily del.icio.us for Jul 22, 2007 through Jul 26, 2007

Daily del.icio.us for Jul 21, 2007 through Jul 22, 2007

Daily del.icio.us for Jun 01, 2007 through Jun 02, 2007