Posts by highpriest

Re: As long as they run a 3G service ...

Except where I live, 4G speeds are so bad that Vodafone support (I kid you not) asked me to switch to 2G so I could continue to make and receive phone calls. Their support is the stuff of nightmares. You don't stand a chance of getting past the first level support drones and they do everything they can to ignore your problem.

Re: estimated net "benefit" of £5.7bn by 2020

This is where I'm confused too. I submit exact meter readings each month. I have had no estimated bills for over 10 years. I also have one of those digital display doodahs (one of those British Gas wireless things) that tell me exactly how much energy I'm consuming in real-time (electricity only) and how much the running total is for the day/week/month.

Apart from the fact that a smart meter would automatically submit my meter readings (as opposed to me taking the reading once a month and submitting it using an app, all of which takes < 5 minutes), I don't see any advantage to this. Not for me anyway.

OK, the thing can take a reading every few minutes if you so wish, giving you a much more granular view of your energy consumption and trends, but that's about it really. Oh, it would include Gas as well (I think) so that's a plus.

Re: So who should I host with?

DigitalOcean. They are utterly brilliant. They now have a datacenter in the UK as well (London). The big boys (Azure, AWS and Google) also do good small VPSes but they will be more expensive. Linode is excellent as well but they don't do a 512 MB VPS at $5/mo like DO.