Emil Larsen (.com)

UK Proxy Server's checkout page

Scothosts got in touch with me after my blog of its proxy service. You can read the original article, with Scothosts’ comment, here.

Scothosts’ response raises three important issues:

1: Scothosts could do more to emphasise you’re signing up for a subscription, because once you’ve added the proxy to the shopping basket it doesn’t explicitly say you’ll be billed every month. When I ordered the proxy, I certainly didn’t realise that it was a subscription. Many people will only need a proxy for a short period of time, covering business travel or a holiday, so this could catch them out (and on that note, why not release a £3/week service?).

2: Scothosts has said 2Mbit/sec is what you can expect from its UK proxy server in Denmark, while I was getting 1.16Mbit/sec – which isn’t far wide of the mark. The speeds should really be advertised better when you’re buying the product. It’s curious that accessing BBC’s iPlayer HD service, which needs 3.2Mbit/sec of bandwidth, worked without a hitch when I couldn’t surf at those speeds elsewhere. This is where my throttling speculation came from, but I accept that there needs to be more investigation on this topic before a true conclusion can be reached (perhaps the iPlayer uses resource-friendly UDP streaming… or something… to help those data packets flow a little quicker).

The clear 30GB per month data allowance offered by Scothosts (for its £9.99 service) is refreshing. I don’t recall seeing that when I ordered the product, but this is the kind of honest advertising many “unlimited bandwidth” ISPs could do with.

3: The way I treat my blog is different to the way I treat my work. When I’m writing articles for computer magazines and websites, I get paid. I’m also in constant contact with the manufacturer, which means any problems I encounter can be discussed to ensure a fair review. Blogging is a more rough and ready approach, plus I’m shelling out my own cash so it’s a more personal and biased form of writing.

The end effect can be the same though: if you google “UK Proxy Server review”, my blog comes top. If it matters to companies, they can avoid a blog’s inherent bias by giving more authoritative sites like The Register a chance to write up on their product or service.

I’ll be writing more about proxy servers on my blog (and, perhaps, for proper publications) in the future. These services are becoming more important with the rise of geographically-restricted internet telly like the iPlayer, Hulu and ITV streaming and, right now, there is a lack of info on what proxies can offer. In the mean time, I’ve decided to remove my rating for Scothosts UK Proxy Server until I’ve tested a few more competing products.

BBC One live streaming

Homesickness can hit us all when we’re travelling or living abroad. Instead of trying to change my tastes though, I always have a jar of marmite and a few British TV shows to hand.

I prefer the BBC’s and ITV’s live-channel streaming service, as well as on-demand services, to downloading TV shows via Bittorrent (which can be a slow process if you’re in a hotel). This means BBC One and ITV live can be watched live on a computer, as long as it has a British IP address.

A proxy server gives you such an address even if you’re sat in outer-Mongolia, which means I can get my weekly dose of Match of the Day, Top Gear and England international football games anywhere in the world.

Setting up a proxy server is easy to do but, as many of these services, you have to change browser depending on what you want to view. BBC’s streaming and iPlayer services only work in Internet Explorer, while ITV’s only seemed to work in Firefox. There’s also an annoying bug in Internet Explorer 8 where it won’t remember your proxy password (even if you follow website guides to reduce IE’s logon security settings), so be prepared to enter it at least three times before you can reliably watch a show.

So, Scothosts sells a proxy for £9.99 per month via its UK Proxy Server website. This is, misleadingly, a Paypal subscription, so 60 quid will roll out of your account if you forget about it for half a year, say.

From Denmark with an 80Mbit/sec fiber connection, I downloaded a file at above 2Mbytes/sec from a private server in the UK without the Scothosts proxy enabled.. With the proxy enabled, this speed plummeted to 148Kbytes/sec. These speeds were typical of my experience, night and day.

Streaming HD content from BBC iPlayer – which goes above this bandwidth – was no problem though, suggesting Scothosts throttles speeds depending on usage.

I also got an error message a couple of times saying only 5 IP address are allowed. This happened when I accessed more than one website, which either brought browsing to a crawl or failed to load webpages at all.

I decided to cancel the service on the first day of my second month and politely asked for a refund, since I didn’t need it for a second month. However, Scothosts ignored my request, but did help me to cancel the rolling subscription. I’m not hugely bothered about paying for another month (because I’ll use the service), but I’m fairly sure Scothosts is breaking the Distant Selling Regulations – in particular the 7-day cooling off period required for all goods and services bought online.

Update: 16/10/2009

Scothosts got in touch to challenge my article (read its response in the comments section). I have therefore written a follow up article to this post.