Free Alternatives to AOL

Ed,

You shouldn’t have to talk to your ISP to do it. You can manually override the DNS servers in your router. I briefly touched on how to do that a while back when I talked about some of the things you didn’t know your wireless router can do.

In addition, setting the DNS server locally to OpenDNS’s will work, too.

~Joe

Overselling is the nature of the Internet though. Most customers (sans geeks) rarely understand the difference between Megabits and Megabytes or any scientific method of measuring service quality or quantity on the Internet.

My host, Dreamhost, has a notorious reputation for Overselling; while this does have its drawbacks, the benefit is people don’t get overages when their site makes it on Digg. It’s Internet Socialism at it’s best, blended with capitalism.

What I do disagree with, is limiting users who do maximize their offer “benefits,” like if you actually do download 20Mb on your connection non-stop… you shouldn’t have to be penalized further because some consultant wanted to have their business model based on overselling.

I think it’s possible that Yahoo could corner yesterday’s AOL market. AOL is getting away from the integrated all-in-one Web experience (pardon the cliche`). AOL’s access business better watch out for what Yahoo and Microsoft… I can totally envision Microsoft blending Yahoo features into their MSN software and banking on the novice AOLer market.

~Joe