ISP Reviews by JamesOakley

I'm editing a review I first posted back in February, because Matt from Xilo has been in touch, and we've been able to sort out a lot of the issues I had been having.

My background: I've used a number of ISPs, but moved to Xilo from PlusNet because of dropped packets; I wanted more reliability and less latency.

Xilo delivered on that. From day 1, the connection was much more reliable. The Broadband section of their client portal is informative, and you can change a few stability settings (such as interleaving) yourself.

Most ISPs will give clients an e-mail address; some will give you perhaps 50MB of webspace for hosting static files. Xilo give you a free small-sized cPanel account on a VPS, that is not crippled or limited in any way. You can even run one site that needs a MySQL database. There's a bonus.

The prices at Xilo are slightly higher than providers like PlusNet, but they are a premium provider that doesn't overload the exchanges. Their prices are no higher than other similar providers.

I eventually left because I was having a string of dropped connections, becoming increasingly frequent. We couldn't solve this without Xilo calling out a BT SFI engineer; I was reluctant because that could end in BT charging me for the callout, and I didn't want that risk. The new provider I'm on now sees the same amount of line noise, but the connections don't drop. Whether this is because they operate a more stable network, or because of the lift-and-shift effected by the migration, I'll never know.

Since leaving, I've had a few communication issues. It's unfortunate they came together. 1. Some error on their ticket system meant I wasn't getting any e-mails when they updated a support ticket. 2. They automatically close your account with them once there are no active services. Those two issues together meant I had no way of reading any replies - I didn't get them by e-mail, and I couldn't log in to read them. 3. They sent a pro-rated refund cheque, but it was lost in the post. I had no way of communicating with them about this. All I could see was me sending them e-mails but nothing ever came back.

That cheque was reissued, and again lost in the post; I'm still waiting for a refund, this time by BACS. But I'm convinced that they are a good provider, and it's unfortunate that several communication problems all happened at the same time just as I was leaving.