Internode Increase Prices, Twice

I use Internode as my current Internet Service Provider, they have been reliable, cost effective and I have not had a single complaint. The day before yesterday they announced that there would be changes to their plans and pricing structure. I now have a complaint.

There has not been an increase or major changes to their offerings since I have been with Internode. Indeed there has not been a price increase for six years. I can appreciate that these things change and inevitably prices always increase. However in this instance it is the percentage of increase and the way in which they have gone about it that sticks in my neck.

The reasons that have been given for the price increases are that while offered line speeds have increase, the cost of provision has not decreased. In other words users have faster speeds, download more and the cost of providing that bandwidth has increased. Internode blame the heavy use of services such as YouTube and BitTorrent for this. I am not sure what they expected users to do. These services especially video are only really available to those on faster connections!  Therefore they have hit the high speed users more than the lower end plans. I presume they use the above for justification for this. They are the ones using the bandwidth so lets charge them the most.

So the price goes up. Which as far as I am concerned is fine. I can understand that if something costs more then you need to essentially cover that cost. For me this means an added cost of about $10 AU to my bill per month. Currently I am on 8000MB/384kB connection with a limit of 20 Gig down per month. I can cop the 10 bucks on the chin. But essentially I have been delt a double blow. My bandwidth has been halved to 10 Gig per month for the same price that I am paying now. The cost to increase to my current 20 Gig limit once the changes are in effect? 10 Bucks… Do you see it? This is not a 10 dollar increase, it is a 20 dollar increase. Because that is what it will cost to maintain my current service.

This was underhanded in my opinion. If you are going to increase my plan by 20 bucks then bloody say that. Don’t halve my service! Don’t tell me that most users don’t use their limit and don’t soften it by saying that you are offering 13 new plans to better suit my budget! This is a massive increase in cost to the end user both in bandwidth and cost. I assumed that maybe it would be 5 – 10 dollars per month, I was very wrong. Internode will loose customers having done this and there are a lot that are not happy. As the Whirlpool Forums, in which users have vented their displeasure is a testament to. There are those defending them as well but more that are trying to wrap their head around exactly what Internode were thinking.

As I said Internode are excellent, I don’t have a complaint about their service. Am I leaving? No, not for the moment, but I am looking at alternatives.

With the advent of the connected world, the increase demands of bandwidth for applications and web development with software technologies such as Ajax, Java and Flash, podcasting, on-line video and gaming this was inevitable. People are using the technology, they are utilizing that which the online universe has presented to them. They are using more bandwidth, they are consuming more resources. It was not like you could not see it coming. But this is only the beginning. The Internet is being programed for users that have the bandwidth to run it, not the other way around. In my opinion the thought that if you give users a faster speed they won’t actually consume more bandwidth was an oversight. Then to slug users that are using these services with a large increase and cripple their ability to use them due to reduced bandwidth limits was wrong.

I am not impressed Internode, at your lack of foresight, your logic, your increase in price and your reduction in my service. But as I said I have been happy with your service and I will give you but few chances and no, you are not a cat and there goes one…

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Storage Limits on WordPress.com

I subscribe to the WordPress FAQ Page. I was doing some catch up tonight, reading stuff that normally I don’t get time to do and came across a post that was made at the week-end and it has caused me to rethink the way I do things.

The reason that I get behind in both blogging and reading feeds that I want to read by the end of the week is my other passion. Podcasting. I get bummed if I have not done some blogging done by Thursday because that usually means that it won’t happen until the following week. I am finalising the show notes for The Global Geek Podcast, sourcing music and everything else that goes into the pre and post production. Something has to, usually my personal blog. But I don’t worry too much as I am still blogging in another way, it just does not feel the same. Especially since I try to keep the two separate, I want people to know that I have different things to say to a focused reader/listener base. It is a hard juggling act.

So I was catching up and I saw that there was an FAQ Post called “Upload Space“. I thought… upload space…, isn’t that; sort of unlimited? Realising that I had made an assumption! But then I thought about it and guessed that some people upload huge images and whatever else they might like to and that unlimited would not be practical at all. So I found out that:

“Images and other files are currently limited to 50MB in total.”

When you consider that a blog is a long term project that may well cover years, I don’t think that it would be that hard to fill it. Even if you optimise your images and change the resolution or even use them infrequently. So I thought about what I do and I guessed that it might just be possible for me to eventually use 50MB.

The suggestions made in the post are the usual suspects: Flickr, photobucket and box.net. So I am going to start using my Flickr page for images such as pictures and stuff like that (because you should never, never “leach” another sites content!). But I thought I might use omnidrive that I previously talked about for logos and screenshots or box.net. Although both the latter have a 1GIG limit, for what I do I am going to be hard pushed to fill it. Then again even if the flickr account looks like going close to the bandwidth limit the cost of a pro account (per year) is less than storage at omnidrive or box.net. So I’ll admit, not sure exactly what I am going to do. I like the downloadable applications that the storage services offer but I like the price of Flickr ($24.95USD p.a) and it is unlimited.

The thing that you have to remember is that while a post for you might be ancient history, the page may well be still viewed and appreciated by your readers. If you want them to look the same way that they did when you posted it then you need to look at the ongoing storage of images and pictures that you used in the post. This hosting requirement will grow as time goes on and the number of posts increases. This then means that your bandwidth need increases. How much? That depends what you post and your reliance on images. Food for thought as you may well be thinking about these things as well.

What solutions are other WordPress.com users doing? If anything.