Rule #1
Don't use your ISPs DNS.
Certain UK TalkTalk customers have been unable to load Amazon's website since last week. The issue emerged on TalkTalk's community page on Monday. The original poster wrote: "Hi for two days now i have had an issue with amazon not loading on three browsers IE, Chrome and Edge." Other users commented to say they have …
Don't use your ISPs DNS.
Not necessairily true - some ISPs don't use throttling or blocking and *their* DNS is safe to use (I'm on Zen and I'm quite happy to use their DNS.. my firewall does have Google DNS as a secondary though).
So to restate your premise:
"Don't use your crappy, race-to-the-bottom, scamming, 'network optimising' ISPs DNS".
For how long can I trust Google?
I have a little notebook with a list of DNS servers, including my ISP, Google, and OpenDNS. If something did go pear-shaped I don't need to look them up on the internet,
Worst-case, I have my android phone.
Doesn't solve the who-to-trust problem, and the whole connection could still fail, but it's some extra resilience.
I actually was with Talk-Talk for a while, after a take-over. Since I have my own domain-name and use non-ISP email, all they had to do was move packets, and they were OK at that.
Some of this is a habit I started in my dial-up days, when the company was bought by another (and both have since vanished).
Only downside? My weird interests can be tracked a long way back, but some of them are even in print.
AAISP use TalkTalk wholesale for some services, like their 1Tb/month Home::1 product.
I've been on this for just over a year - performance and stability has been consistently good apart from the occasional blip, but TT have been working with the ISP's to fix problems.
It's a VERY different experience to the misery that is TalkTalk retail.
Aye. They're eye-wateringly expensive, but well worth it if/when things go wrong.
A couple of years back, BT dumped my line into a "hot" VLAN and performance went down the toilet at peak times. Most normal ISP's would have given up and told me to accept the fact that I now had a crap line, but AAISP went out of their way to make BT sort out the problem. This one went up to BT's High Level Escalation (HLE) team, and was eventually fixed:
http://www.revk.uk/2015/03/some-times-bt-just-dont-understand.html
As I've said elsewhere, AAISP have a secret weapon for dealing with BT - answers to the name "Shaun", likes BT managers but will eat normal food if required !
I haven't had to use it for a while as I haven't had any issues in at least the last 3 years, but Plus.Net used to exceed the xkcd standard as you didn't need to use a pass phrase to talk to someone that knew what they were doing.
I hope this is still the case, but I also hope I don't have to find out anytime soon.
I would mock people on talk talk, but I logged into my Zen account page for the first time in years and it says I'm on talk talk business. I've always had great service from Zen, but this worries me.
Where did you see this - my Zen account says nothing of the sort - but may be I am not looking in the right place?