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Why choose ISP Ltd?

Since Linux is free, why not just do it myself?

With the assistance of ISP Ltd. you can be operational quickly. We will come to you, wherever you are in the world, and work with your staff to build, install, configure, and programme the server network. In as little as two months you will not only have a fully operational ISP, but also a trained staff.

Does experience matter? Have you ever heard about a helpful neighbour who made someone's computer much worse by trying to help? Our programming experience dates back to 1976 and our Linux server experience (building and operating an ISP) to 1998. We can build what you want, fix whatever isn't working, show you the mistakes to avoid, and share tips, tools, and techniques that will give you a competitive advantage.

If you are in Africa, our knowledge of the business challenges there could be helpful. We have customers in Angola, Algeria, and Nigeria, and have consulted with prospective African ISPs from almost every country on the continent. With this base of knowledge we will start with some mutual understanding that not many other North American companies can offer.

Much of the cost of obtaining any product is the overhead and profit margin of the company. Our company is small and our goals are modest. We went against Lucent and Schlumberger, bidding our top-of-the-line Metropolitan HC package for a new telecomm, and won. Four years later, that network is still operating in Lagos, Nigeria. Our first network in Luanda, Angola is still operating to this day, and that ISP has grown to become the largest in the city (and they say their growth owes thanks to the stable Linux platform we established for them, which has kept them running when other ISPs had server failures).

Technical Excellence. We chose Linux for our ISP because it was technically superior. We never had occasion to regret that decision, having evaluated it carefully against Windows and Solaris. The GNU/Linux operating system was modelled after the time-tested Unix developed by the US government and Bell Labs in the 1960s for the military and universities. This excellent foundation and the help of tens of thousands of programmers and contributors around the world have firmly established its technical superiority. You want Linux running on your servers, not an operating system that has over a hundred-thousand viruses and is the constant target of adolescent hackers around the world.

Cost and licence terms are important concerns for every business, whether an ISP or simply a business that hosts its own Internet servers. You have probably seen advertisements, but have you ever closely looked at the cost and licence terms of Windows server software?

Compare, for example, the complex licence of the Microsoft SQL server, especially in an environment where you are hosting data for other paying clients, to the liberating one-page licence of PostgreSQL. Also compare the licence terms of Linux itself, which falls under the GNU General Public Licence as does a large percentage of Linux software, with the Windows server licence. If you are going to build a business foundation on Internet servers, you owe it to yourself to know the licence terms which define the relationship you are establishing with the software copyright holders.

With GNU/Linux you have an unlimited and free licence for the vast majority of server software, the ultimate security that is constantly checked and improved by thousands of programmers world-wide who specialise in the various software areas of Linux, the fastest networking speed shown in tests I have read on the Internet, very efficient and stable use of server resources (how many operating systems can boast server up-times measured in years?), outstanding support in probably every language on the planet where computers are used, and an amazing range of software. These claims can be readily verified with some research on the Internet.

We take the advantages of Linux's speed as far as we can by installing all software from source code. This means that all software is optimised for your server hardware. All other operating systems, even most Linux distributions, come pre-compiled. This is convenient but makes the server operate more slowly. Using the Gentoo Linux package management tools, we will give you the fastest and most stable set of servers possible, and tools and instructions to easily keep it secure and up-to-date.