Trevor Cordes wrote:
It's the loss of freedom that irks me so much. 10 years ago the 'Net was touted as the "great equalizer", where every box on it was equal. Now they want to limit your activity and say: pay $10/mo for email hosting, pay $15/mo for web hosting, pay $20/mo for DNS hosting, pay $40/mo for static IP so you can do your own hosting; or what is truly the only way to have full control: pay $150+/mo for colocating a server.
I certainly understand where Trevor is coming from. On the other hand Internet access pricing is a balancing act. You want to make it affordable by the masses but you do have to make a profit. One can argue about what services you artificially limit and charge more for but with the current business model it seems inevitable that you are going to get the pricing environment that we have today.
A blast from the past thanks to the Way Back machine.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990117005122/www.mbnet.mb.ca/mbnet_rates.html
1998 (only eight years ago) MBnet was charging $3,999/month for a 3mbps connection. And this rate was very competitive!
I am not that concerned with differential pricing between client and server but I am bugged by the asymmetric bandwidth model. This trend is being somewhat reversed but it is still very difficult to get reasonably priced upload bandwidth.
-- Bill