The WebhostingTalk thread makes interesting reading:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1005111
SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
51–60 of 91 posts
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#52While they may very well win in court - their business will be destroyed. Why on earth was their CDN built around a single provider? Had they had multiple providers,this would have ended in reduced capacity, with buffer time to re-deploy elsewhere. Sounds like a good lesson learned - when I need bandwidth X for Y years, I make sure I have solid contracts to that effect - not just relying on a simple clause about seve…
It looks like they built it around two: UK2 (under multiple brands of theirs too) and Softlayer. But both colluded to shut down SimpleCDN at the same time.
The main problem is they went to the datacenter providers first, not the network providers. DCs make their money over the long term by selling hardware cheap up front (just a monthly fee) and hoping ongoing costs remain low. CDNs put a high operating cost on the system, so it is one place they end up losing out big time.
What they should have done is partnered directly with a network provider. I was looking over at the MaxCDN offer they linked to on the page and they appear to have partnered with Mzima. That's a smart move (Mzima's an awesome network; akin to Internap, but a lot cheaper). Maybe if SimpleCDN recovers from all of this, they'll start approaching things differently and stop trying to put stress on a business relationship where it hurts the most.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#53On a side note, I haven't heard a single good thing from anyone about the ISP in question. One of their brands, VPS.NET, was an absolute nightmare and almost tanked the launch of one of our projects. A friend who made the mistake of going with them as well, had nothing but headaches. The main issues were reliability and poor customer care.
Seriously, as much as their team "care" their product is absolute shit. My experience with vps.net has put me off UK2 for life, some of the things I've seen in the customer forum are just plain scary. Like the admission they don't have the infrastructure to handle DDoS attacks because it's "too expensive".
Wow, really? I've been pondering whether I should get off linode and try out vps.net due to the elastic scaling they have (burstable memory, etc), but damn, they're this bad?
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a hilarious tactic. Are they now going to blacklist bandwidth intensive business models one by one until only blogs and "under construction" pages are left on their "high bandwidth" plans?
It's amusing in context, but it's not an absurd contract term. Hosting a CDN on an "unlimited" hosting provider is basically bandwidth arbitrage. It makes total sense that the hosting provider would want to limit their hosting to bona fide hosting customers.
Yeah, never arbitrage the arbitrageurs; they won't stand for it.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amusing in context, but it's not an absurd contract term. Hosting a CDN on an "unlimited" hosting provider is basically bandwidth arbitrage. It makes total sense that the hosting provider would want to limit their hosting to bona fide hosting customers.
Yeah, never arbitrage the arbitrageurs; they won't stand for it.
Why should they? Companies have every right to choose their own business model.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
We (at DreamHost) don't state any explicit limits as they're pretty fluid in practice. The effective limits are basically: * Don't use enough resources that you make it hard for us to provide good service to other customers. (Saturating the network / filling the filesystem = bad.) * If you're legitimately using lots of resources, we'll move you around if you start getting near the limits on the hardware you're on, bu…
What you're describing is exactly the problem. I don't want to worry about whether or not I'm exceeding some subjective limit, I want a hard number limit that I can compare to my actual usage.
Hmmm, I think the dreamhost guy gave a pretty good explanation. Thanks for that. But he seems to be getting downmodded (downmod if he's wrong; not if you disagree).
Yes, it's subjective ("doesn't require us to upgrade infra just for you"), but so what? If you want hard numbers, go with the ones which advertise hard limits.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#57The information is spotty but from what I gather it seems someone (SimpleCDN) took the "unlimited bandwidth" claims on 100tb.com a little bit too literally - and tried to build a business around them. The question remains why a supposed infrastructure company thought it'd be a good idea to rely on a single other company to provide their... infrastructure.
If that's the case, maybe both parties are at fault. Claiming availability of 'unlimited bandwidth' is just as naive as believing in it. In any case, I don't understand why the ISP wouldn't choose to send any communication about the termination. Seems like reckless behaviour.
They make you pay extra for an unmetered gigabit port, so it seems reasonable that you should be able to use more than the standard bandwidth allocation if you pay for more and if you don't you should be able to use the standard package.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#58From 100TB's TOS (presumably just added): We will not provide services to those that are using our services for: A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is prohibited from running on our network. Special requests to run CDN services may be approved on a case by case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will result in the disabling of all hosting services. http://www.100tb.com/tos.php
That's a hilarious tactic. Are they now going to blacklist bandwidth intensive business models one by one until only blogs and "under construction" pages are left on their "high bandwidth" plans?
I was wondering the ame thing. If I were to start youtube on 100tb, would I be blacklisted too?
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
We (at DreamHost) don't state any explicit limits as they're pretty fluid in practice. The effective limits are basically: * Don't use enough resources that you make it hard for us to provide good service to other customers. (Saturating the network / filling the filesystem = bad.) * If you're legitimately using lots of resources, we'll move you around if you start getting near the limits on the hardware you're on, bu…
What you're describing is exactly the problem. I don't want to worry about whether or not I'm exceeding some subjective limit, I want a hard number limit that I can compare to my actual usage.
What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.
All of it is going to cost you more than Dreamhost's incredibly cheap prices - which are only possible because of it's police, as the guy stated.
It seems unfair at first - especially to a technical person, it's misleading - but the reality of hosting is that you do need to actually pay for the resources you are going to use - and the internet isn't free. The more your business is worth, the more you should be spending on solid contracts, multiple sourcing and fault tolerance.
Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, as much as their team "care" their product is absolute shit. My experience with vps.net has put me off UK2 for life, some of the things I've seen in the customer forum are just plain scary. Like the admission they don't have the infrastructure to handle DDoS attacks because it's "too expensive".
Wow, really? I've been pondering whether I should get off linode and try out vps.net due to the elastic scaling they have (burstable memory, etc), but damn, they're this bad?
I was with them for 1 year, September 2009 - September 2010 and I've now moved to Linode. I would highly recommend you stay away from them. The longest I went without downtime was 90 days, in total I've had well over 40 hours of downtime within 1 year, I've never had that much elsewhere even on dedicated hardware that isn't as "redundant" as they claim to be.
Their product is amazing if you don't care for stability and then it beats the competition hands down, but if stability and uptime matter to you at all stay away. If vps.net had the stability and reliability of Linode they'd rule the world.
Sign up for a daily node ($1) and then login to the customer forum, you'll see so many reports of problems and this is after they recently "revamped" the forum and removed over a years worth of posts. I can't provide links because they removed my access.