Small and friendly (Internet For Business)

Member Name: neepheid

Product:	Internet For Business
Date:	01/05/02 (125 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: knowledgeable tech support, reliability, wide range of solutions

Disadvantages: tech support hours

Internet for Business are a small business to business ISP based in Aberdeen, with an office in Edinburgh. They provide a wide range of facilities ranging from the simplest dial up account, to leased lines and server hosting. They offer a wide range of packages, most of which are aimed at businesses (being their main audience) but offer dialup and ADSL connections for home users. I have my ADSL through them.

The main difference between IFB and a lot of others is the quality of the technical support that you get. Being a small company, their technical support line is staffed by people who actually use the products and services on a daily basis. No call centre staff working from a cheat sheet, they can apply their knowledge to home in on any problems you might have quickly and authoratively.

The service has been reliable for me (and my place of work, who also have ADSL from IFB), and any problems that have arisen have been dealt with quickly. I recently asked them to set up a few IP filters on our ADSL router at work to allow the US office to access our mail server direct - try getting a call centre techie to do that. A simple email and it was done in a day.

Nothing's perfect. The technical support is only during office hours. They have 24hour support for guaranteed services like leased lines and their own kit (of course), but if you hit a problem with your ADSL of an evening, you can't report it till the next day (or after the weekend!), this may be off-putting for some.

They are not the cheapest either, but for no nonsense connectivity, web hosting, domain hosting, web design or server hosting, I heartily recommend checking out IFB.

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