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SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

admin.simplecdn.com

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Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#61

Post by dedward »

timdorr wrote: post #52
dedward wrote: post #28

While 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 s…

That's odd - every datacenter (read: colocation facility) I've worked with had clear pricing for rack space, power, bandwidth, etc -I could use as much as I wanted, and I knew what I'd pay for it, and would re-negotiate if the regular usage was going to go higher.

By DC's - do you mean some kind of web-hosting provider instead?

Even the VM providers I use all have soft & hard limits on traffic stated clearly - in practice, anyone offering "unlimited" anything is automatically excluded from any kind of critical business hosting decision - because that's not realistic or maintainable.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#62

Post by lhnn »

dedward wrote: post #59
cmelbye wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

I think what your parent and I are in support of are something that can be guaranteed, regardless of price. If I have contractual obligations to people regarding my webhost's uptime and bandwidth, I want the webhost to give me something more than "It changes a lot, don't use too much".

When the barrier to entry for an internet-based business is so low, I expect ISPs and other service providers to understand this requirement, and provide plans and prices accordingly.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#63

Post by moe »

tptacek wrote: post #55
wmf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, never arbitrage the arbitrageurs; they won't stand for it.

Why should they? Companies have every right to choose their own business model.

In this particular case it comes across as more than a little bit shady.

When you advertise aggressively with high volume/high bandwidth, when you even rename your company from 10tb.com to 100tb.com, then one would hope you'd handle it a tad bit more professionally when someone calls your bluff.

I wonder if they considered that by pulling the plug on SimpleCDN like this they've also effectively terminated their own business. Nobody in their right mind will host at 100tb after this event.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#64

Post by tptacek »

moe wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they? Companies have every right to choose their own business model.

In this particular case it comes across as more than a little bit shady. When you advertise aggressively with high volume/high bandwidth, when you even rename your company from 10tb.com to 100tb.com, then one would hope you'd handle it a tad bit more professionally when someone calls your bluff. I wonder if they considered that by pulling the plug on SimpleCDN like this they've also effectively terminated their own b…

Like I said, in context, it's amusing. That contract term, though, is totally reasonable.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#65

Post by PostOnce »

citricsquid wrote: post #49
jonknee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was able to process payments just fine for both during the DDOS...

oh really? I spoke to someone who was unable to process payments and I saw a lot of people reporting it. Maybe it was isolated due to location? The people reporting it I saw were in the UK.

Hearsay, but I read it was a Mastercard problem limited specifically to the UK.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#66

Post by skorgu »

tybris wrote: post #44
mdaniel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does mastercard.com process payments? I got the impression that it was just the marketing/corporate presence that was affected.

Securecode was affected as well, which is the payment portal you need to go through for many on-line shops.

Securecode is theoretically optional in most cases, transactions that go through it generally cost less than non-securecode ones but it shouldn't stop all transaction processing in most cases.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#67

Post by xd »

anonymous246 wrote: post #56
cmelbye wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just how I see it, but "unlimited" is a "hard limit". If you don't provide unlimited service, then say so, it's not rocket science.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#68

Post by [deleted] »

tybris wrote: post #22

Could this month get any better for Amazon? -It's December -Mastercard.com and Paypal.com went down making Amazon one of the few on-line shops that could still process payments -Since no Amazon service went down under DDoS, big companies will come crawling to them to use AWS -SimpleCDN goes down, no doubt driving lots of customers to bigger parties like AWS -They are making boat loads of money http://www.wolframalpha…

[deleted]

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#69

Post by Guatejon »

andfarm wrote: post #37
bmelton wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that's the case, honestly, and I hope that it does go to court. I'm frankly sick and tired of the 'unlimited' advertising model, wherein unlimited really means limited to some arbitrary amount that is not disclosed. As a customer who has been kicked off of a number of unlimited hosting services for a site that only does ~30Gb or so in traffic in a month, I'd love to see hard limits advertised rather than 'unli…

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…

DreamHost "solved" our problematic site by banning the search engine spiders from our site. Apparently we were being spidered too much so they changed the htaccess (without our knowledge) to ban them. But the site did stay up and I am sure we were using less resources after that. The site more or less dried up traffic wise.

Re: SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

#70

Post by Groxx »

dedward wrote: post #59
cmelbye wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

>What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

Yes, but by not stating a limit, while still enforcing one at some point, you are effectively not allowing yourself to be compared with others.

It's cheating. Even a rough "approximate limit" would allow comparisons, but stating nothing is strictly cheating. Would Dreamhost allow me to run 100tb/day? 100pb/day? They don't say they won't... how do their prices compare against someone who would?

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