Welcome to the joys and sorrows of hosting user-generated content. If this makes you feel better,rackspace is just your first problem. You'll also find soon enough that abuses can get your domain blacklisted in chrome, firefox, and for opendns users.
Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think that it is reasonable if someone creates a phishing website on heroku, and all servers on heroku got shut down by amazon in an hour?
No, and that's a strawman argument. That's like asking if it were reasonable for Level 3 to pull the plug on Rackspace if Level 3 got a phishing complaint. If Amazon got complains about Heroku then I'd certainly expect them to be investigated, and in Heroku's case I'd expect Heroku would take over and shutdown the phishing site.
I think everyone agreed on that the service provide have to investigate and take action on any abuse claim. But what is questioning now is that is it reasonable to shutdown a suspect case of abuse without giving time for the service provider to investigate and respond to this case?
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone hate spam. I don't object Rackspace to shut down an account that is obviously phishing/spam, but not take down as soon as they think there is an abuse. Grace period must be given, so the the site holder can respond. I don't think it is possible for few-man startup can responds in 1 hours for 24x7. I would choose to use an alternative hosting that give a longer gracing period.
> Grace period must be given, so the the site holder can respond. Unfortunately, during that grace period, numerous people may be receiving spam emails directing them to the site, and some of those people may be naively entering their information ... I really dislike the way most service providers and the like handle spam, but unfortunately, I too must side with Rackspace on this one. They simply can not afford to "w…
:-/
For your argument, I just created an wufoo form which should take down immediately once discovered. http://rickmak.wufoo.com/forms/phishing/. IN that case, I am sure only my account will be taken down, not the whole wufoo.
Actually, it depends on size. If someone created a phishing site on Heroku's, Amazon probably won't shutdown all Heroku sites. But to let Heroku to investigate. For small startup like pandaform, no luck. Rackspace just regards you as one site.
Pandaform can handle things better, like banned "password" field like wufoo do.
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#34How was this construed as "phishing"? Did the customer simply set up a form that asks for a user's email address? because if so that describes tons of other services out there... e.g. Wufoo, Google Documents (but I guess they are not hosted on Rackspace!)
FYI, my phishing form @wufoo: http://rickmak.wufoo.com/forms/phishing/
Look professional? ;) Similar form on pandaform will make pandaform shutdown entirely.
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone hate spam. I don't object Rackspace to shut down an account that is obviously phishing/spam, but not take down as soon as they think there is an abuse. Grace period must be given, so the the site holder can respond. I don't think it is possible for few-man startup can responds in 1 hours for 24x7. I would choose to use an alternative hosting that give a longer gracing period.
> Grace period must be given, so the the site holder can respond. Unfortunately, during that grace period, numerous people may be receiving spam emails directing them to the site, and some of those people may be naively entering their information ... I really dislike the way most service providers and the like handle spam, but unfortunately, I too must side with Rackspace on this one. They simply can not afford to "w…
The real issue to me is their apparent zero tolerance policy. Unless I'm misreading something, if there are two incidents where your site is used for phishing, you will lose your Rackspace account. I understand that Rackspace doesn't want to go chasing these things left and right, but it seems that's a little extreme, especially when they're supposed to be infrastructure providers, and should recognize that their clients have clients, and their clients shouldn't be held entirely responsible for the actions of their clients' clients.
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#36All this talk about how Rackspace should be treating startups make me think, "Why?" I understand startups may not have the personel to react as fast as a larger company with dedicated personel, and I understand that there might be a very large percentage of startups on Rackspace which might account for a nice chunk of revenue. But what makes startups different from my personal website or a larger corporation? If Rack…
It is like asking why we need special facilities in building for the disables. Why didn't we treat everybody the same and don't provide any special facilities for disable?
I do think that site owner of any scale IS responsible to abuse complains, but the scale of the company do make a different. The influence and harmfulness of a fake shop in Amazon is not same as a fake shop in a very-small-online-shop. Thus people expect Amazon to take action instantly.
A start-up is not possibile to react as fast as large company, so why shouldn't we give them a reasonable time for them to do their job?
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#37All this talk about how Rackspace should be treating startups make me think, "Why?" I understand startups may not have the personel to react as fast as a larger company with dedicated personel, and I understand that there might be a very large percentage of startups on Rackspace which might account for a nice chunk of revenue. But what makes startups different from my personal website or a larger corporation? If Rack…
It is like asking why we need special facilities in building for the disables. Why didn't we treat everybody the same and don't provide any special facilities for disable? I do think that site owner of any scale IS responsible to abuse complains, but the scale of the company do make a different. The influence and harmfulness of a fake shop in Amazon is not same as a fake shop in a very-small-online-shop. Thus people…
The people being phished don't care how big you are or how fast you can respond. What would they consider a reasonable time?
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#38All this talk about how Rackspace should be treating startups make me think, "Why?" I understand startups may not have the personel to react as fast as a larger company with dedicated personel, and I understand that there might be a very large percentage of startups on Rackspace which might account for a nice chunk of revenue. But what makes startups different from my personal website or a larger corporation? If Rack…
It is like asking why we need special facilities in building for the disables. Why didn't we treat everybody the same and don't provide any special facilities for disable? I do think that site owner of any scale IS responsible to abuse complains, but the scale of the company do make a different. The influence and harmfulness of a fake shop in Amazon is not same as a fake shop in a very-small-online-shop. Thus people…
So you're comparing your startup to a disabled person?
Unlike the hypothetical disabled person, however, your startup, when used for phishing, is allowing real harm to happen to other people.
Your attitude suggests that a) you care less about your clients than about what's convenient for you as a startup founder, because b) you're small. But that's a very bad excuse, and a dumb one, at that. Clients don't care about your size. All they care about is the results your products give them. And that leads to another question: why should anyone buy into your services if you don't/can't act promptly and responsibly in response to problems?
And yet you seem to be getting angry about Rackspace for caring about the clients affected by such criminal activity further downstream from them.
I'd think twice before buying into your products, with an attitude like that. Rackspace appears to care. You do not.
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is like asking why we need special facilities in building for the disables. Why didn't we treat everybody the same and don't provide any special facilities for disable? I do think that site owner of any scale IS responsible to abuse complains, but the scale of the company do make a different. The influence and harmfulness of a fake shop in Amazon is not same as a fake shop in a very-small-online-shop. Thus people…
So you're comparing your startup to a disabled person? Unlike the hypothetical disabled person, however, your startup, when used for phishing, is allowing real harm to happen to other people. Your attitude suggests that a) you care less about your clients than about what's convenient for you as a startup founder, because b) you're small. But that's a very bad excuse, and a dumb one, at that. Clients don't care about…
I am the original author of the article here.
I want to add that it is because we care about our clients, so we can't accept a service like that.
You are assuming the form must be phishing, and is a criminal act. But we were given no details about the complaint from Rackspace, even after the site is back online and I have an opportunity to disable the site painfully, I still cannot figure out how the form is "phishing".
So besides the short notice, it is Rackspace as a servers provider, act on behalf of you as a service provider to identify what is criminal what is not. I keep asking for more details about the complaint but none were given besides a URL.
Re: Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again
#40What is missing from this article (and comments so far) is a more comprehensive analysis of available options. If I lease a server from linode or AWS or theplanet or serverbeach or ${your favorite hosting provider}, would the situation be any different? I understand the article's author frustration with Rackspace, but it's a single data point hence hardly enough to be a basis for an intelligent choice of hosting prov…
So far I only know from one of my frd doing another startup, saying they experience something like this with Linode and were given 24 hrs to respond.
This align with the respond I got from Linode, so I am actually considering to migrate from rackspace cloud to linode shortly.