DSLReports

DSLReports

Screenshot of the DSLReports website.
Available in English
Created by Justin Beech
Editor Karl Bode
Website http://www.dslreports.com/
Alexa rank 5,515 (November 9, 2015)
Commercial Yes
Registration Optional
Launched May 28, 1999

DSLReports, located at the web URL www.dslreports.com is a North American-oriented information and review site based in New York City. The site's main focus is on Internet, Phone, Cable TV, Fiber Optics, and Wireless services in the United States and Canada, and other countries (United Kingdom and Australia). As of July 2014, dslreports.com is the third result which shows up on Google when searching for the term "broadband".

DSLReports was created by Justin Beech in June 1999.[1] According to Alexa's pageranking systema and the WHOIS, dslreports.com went online on May 28, 1999. The domain is scheduled to expire on May 28, 2018.

April 27, 2011 major event

Over a period of 4 hours on Wednesday April 27, 2011 an automated SQL Injection attack occurred on DSLReports website that was able to extract 8% of the username/password pairs: 8,000 random accounts of the 9,000 active and 90,000 old or inactive accounts.[2][3][4]

Outage

On Monday, April 16, 2012 at 1:50 PM EST DSLReports went offline due to a serious power failure at their host's datacenter. While Net Access Corporation did temporarily have power with battery backup, the gas generator failed to come on, thus exhausting battery power. Due to this unusual power failure, it knocked out the database server, rendering the site useless. Net Access Corporation didn't have any "snapshots" of DSLReports data, and although all data was intact, the SQL servers had no access to the database. By May 3, 2012 some site features had been restored, including the ability read posts, receive instant messages, and create posts. At that time, only posts, news articles and ISP reviews created before about September 17, 2010 could be read as well posts and news articles created after May 3, 2012. On May 11, 2012, at around 10:00 PM EDT, the site went offline temporarily as the final restoration of the site was implemented. It has been estimated by the site owners that the cost of the recovery was in excess of $28,000. The site was not 100% available immediately after recovery, but most bugs were virtually undetectable by most users. [5]

Site features

Reviews

DSLReports allows its users to submit reviews of their Internet service provider (ISP), Web hosting service, digital phone service (VOIP), and more.[6] Users may also read reviews written by others. Many large ISPs have over a thousand reviews on the site. Reviews may be filtered for the user's location and/or connectivity preference.

News

The site is also a source of Internet related news, sometimes being the first to report a story about a broadband Internet service provider.[7] DSLR's editors post Internet-related news items on the site's front page throughout the day. Common topics of news items and features include wireless technologies, peer-to-peer file sharing, upgrades and new offerings from ISPs, legal/regulatory issues, and security issues.

Tools

Speed tests

The DSLReports speed test claims to be the best speed test and the first popular speed test.[8] The speed test uses HTML5.

Ping tests

DSLReports does have a ping and jitter test.[9]

Other tests and tools

Other tools include stream tests, line monitoring, tweak testing, packet loss testing, and many other tools.[10][11][12] Some of these services are provided free of charge, but others require the user to purchase "tool points", which are approximately $1.

Community

DSLReports operates over 200 forums, many of which focus on Internet and computer-related topics.[13] Other forums are dedicated to general conversation, political discussions, do-it-yourself projects or regional discussions. There are over a 1.8 million total registered users on the DSLReports forums. [14] A discussion forum is automatically created for every news article posted on the front page, which allows members to discuss the article in question. It should be noted that while membership is free, the forum community allows for anonymous posting so the information or source in [anonymous] posts may be questionable as compared to posts made by actual frequent members of the site.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/faq/8098
  2. ↑ site user password intrusion info
  3. ↑ "DSLReports says member information stolen". Cnet News. 2011-04-28. Retrieved 2011-04-29.
  4. ↑ "DSLReports.com breach exposed more than 100,000 accounts". The Tech Herald. 2011-04-29. Retrieved 2011-04-29.
  5. ↑ [?url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kll86bDn_MgWoo6Ja7oHo_yvI0SCqggEvNWwPWIcrHY/edit "Archived copy"] Check |archiveurl= value (help). Archived from the original on May 9, 2012. Retrieved May 9, 2012."Archived copy". Retrieved May 9, 2012. = http://www.webcitation.org/67XYjWbyG
  6. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/reviews
  7. ↑ http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9837
  8. ↑ "Speed test - how fast is your internet? | DSLReports, ISP Information". DSL Reports. Retrieved 2015-11-09.
  9. ↑ "Ping test - how good is your internet? | DSLReports, ISP Information". DSL Reports. Retrieved 2015-11-09.
  10. ↑ "Speed tests, ping tests and bandwidth tools | DSLReports, ISP Information". DSL Reports. Retrieved 2015-11-09.
  11. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/tools
  12. ↑ http://www.thenakedpc.com/articles/v03/08/0308-02.html
  13. ↑ "ISP discussion forums | DSLReports, ISP Information". DSL Reports. Retrieved 2015-11-09.
  14. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/who

External links

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