You know it, I know it, but do they?

It's not just the fact that you can get internet access, e-mail accounts and even Usenet news for free...

I made a pointless attempt at complaining to my old ISP Demon not so much about paying £11.75 a month for what I can get for nothing elsewhere. I knew there was no point complaining about that. Demon have given up on the home market and are raking in cash from slow coaches like me who take ages to cancel their own accounts.

No, I complained about their business tarifs.

I wanted to buy a domain name and have it mapped to some web space - and I was staggered at how much they would charge me for doing this, especially when compared with outfits like Nicnames. Nicnames would even throw in 100 megs of web space for £100 and here's the rub - Nicnames allow you to run server-side includes on their servers.

So what the hell are server-side includes and why do you want them? Well if you're maintaining a website they are incredibly useful - they allow you to put a line of code in your webpages that says "hey, insert the text file called index.html here".

You can then have one file for an index or footer which appears in all your web pages, and when you need to update your index you only have to edit and upload one file.

Now even if you go on Demon's Diva tarif (funny name, guys, are you sure that name wouldn't be better suited to Dircon?), paying them buckets of cash per month (£700 for 1000Mb) - they still won't allow you to run server-side includes!

I know why, of course. Server-side includes put additional strain on the server as each page has to be parsed to see what files to include - but if Nicnames can handle it, why not the huge we-were-here-first-and-we're-the-most-professional Demon cope?

And domain name registration? Demon charge their valued customers a cool £50 plus VAT, and read the small print... "*for the first year only & £200 per year plus VAT per year thereafter." Two hundred quid a year for web and mail forwarding??? I spent £52 and around £14 a year thereafter with Nicnames after two years! And for some reason Demon act like their deal is some sort of perk.

And my complaint about the high cost of web hosting and lack of SSIs? I got a form letter e-mail reply trying to justify £11.75 a month for dial up access. No mention of SSIs, or indeed any of the points I raised in my original e-mail.

It's not just Demon, of course. Two friends are having spookily similar battles with Direct Connection, a company they feel far more loyalty to that I do to Demon. One of them has been a Dircon customer since before anyone had even heard of the World Wide Web.

This morning I got a glossy new brochure from Demon unveiling their bizarre new slogan. They just don't get it, do they?