You should be in India if you have got anything at all to do with hosting. There is not one single web hosting company in the US that doesnt have something to do with India. Be it backend support, server monitoring, billing assitance or anything at all, companies would have tied up with someone in India for help.

So, if you happen to be running such a company in India, what is most suitable for you for internet connectivity? One major problem in India are frequent powercuts. The Electricity department is not good anywhere throughout the country. Corruption, and non maintenance of cables are the only reason. But this situation is changing in several parts of the country. Then again you have got UPS systems installed, if you are in serious business. So power is not something that we  should be worrying about.

BSNL provides you with the worst of services Never go for them. Airtel has got their own trans oceanic cable laid from Chennai to Singapore, so their service is supposed to be very good. Tata Indicom, formerly VSNL too has a good line that is connecting directly somewhere, but there are disruptions in the service. Never make the mistake of getting a connection from Relianc, Hathway is good, but DNS problems occur often.

You need to choose between a leased line and a broad band connection and the data transfer volume that you would require, which would depend on the number of PCs that you might be having at your facility. Instead of getting 1 single 2 Mbps line, you could go for 10×256 kbps lines, which might cost you a bit more, but you will have consistency of data flow to systems without any breakage.

Remember that you would be using a lot of server software to connect to and to monitor remote servers. You need lots and lots of data transfer limit, and a limited 2 Mbps connection would never suffice.

India’s very own broadband service, BSNL, which is also a major telephone operator in India, gave me real hell last night. I have a 2 Mbps plan with a 2.5 GB traffic limit per month, with unlimited transfer from 2 am to 8 am. So these days what I do is I go to sleep very early, at around 8 pm, then get up at 2 am, download what ever I want, and then take a short nap from 8am to 10am, and then get ready and come straight to the office. The things I am having to do to download stuff at 2 Mbps.

Last night, I was desperately trying to download an audio book of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and the highest download speed I could get was about 8 KBps, which is around 64 Kbps. I pay them a rent of Rs 600 per month, and they assure me a minimum speed of 256 Kbps at all times, and at night I get only 64 Kbps. How am I to sue these people? And how do I prove to court that was unable to get a speed of the promised 256 Kbps? I couldn’t download the book, and my travel today is really going to be boring.