Getting Ready to Shop for an ISP

Your first step in finding a service provider is to assess your needs. Before you can choose a provider that meets your requirements, you must know what your requirements are for services and bandwidth. Perhaps that is stating the obvious; unfortunately, it's not unusual for people to look for an ISP with nothing more than the vague idea that they want to "get connected." That's a difficult goal to accomplish satisfactorily; it leaves many questions unanswered because they aren't even asked. Connected for what purpose? To pursue which activities? What cost is considered reasonable?

Once you know what you want, you can approach ISPs with a common set of questions and you'll be better able to compare them. If you don't figure out what you want in advance, you'll be learning what questions to ask with each successive ISP, you'll get incomplete information, and it will be more difficult to compare them.

As one part of your evaluation, you might consider making a few preliminary calls to see if you can find an ISP or two that offers an assessment service to help you determine what you need. If the service actually is geared toward helping you specify your requirements (as opposed to being simply another sales technique for pushing services you don't want or need), you may have found a provider with at least one strength: customer service.

Keep in mind as you shop that some organizations that provide services such as MySQL access and Web site hosting do not provide dialup service. You may actually be best served by choosing one provider for basic dialup connectivity, allowing you to access the Internet, and another for database and Web activities. (Or you already may have an ISP for dialup access that you are satisfied with, in which case you need to find a provider only for database and Web services.) The following "Bandwidth" and "Services" sections describe the types of concerns that are most appropriately addressed by each type of ISP.

Bandwidth

Providers offer various options, from dedicated lines (faster) to dialup modem connections (slower). In general, the tradeoff is between cost and speed: Fast access costs more. If you're going to shuttle a lot of data between your computer and the ISP's host, a modem connection may be too slow. In certain cases, however, you may be able to get by with a slower connection between the ISP and yourself. For example, if most of the activity you sustain on the ISP host is due to your customers accessing your database from upstream (through a Web site, for example), then most of your database traffic will be outbound from the ISP.

Services

The mostobvious requirement for any candidate ISP is that it provides MySQL, but the following services might be necessary or desirable as well:

• An email account. This is essential for communicating with the ISP's technical support staff, and you can use it to join one or more of the MySQL mailing lists.

• Telnet access to a shell account. This gives you the ability to run standard UNIX utilities and to use MySQL command-line clients such as mysql,mysqldump, and mysqlimport. You may also be able to install your own software.

• Additional MySQL-related services. These might include Web site hosting, PHP, and CGI capabilities.

• FTP. This is useful for transferring files between your computer and the ISP's machine. For example, you'll likely have some data files you want to load into your database to populate it initially, or you may generate output from the database that you want to manipulate on your own machine. You may also want to allow people to download your files.

• Domain name registration. This gives you email and Web site addresses under your own domain name rather than under the domain of your ISP. This is a desirable service if you want to establish a Web or FTP presence under a name that can be readily identified with your organization or business.