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

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

#71

Post by jrockway »

xd wrote: post #43
andfarm wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

I'm curious, why don't you state limits on your site? You state "unlimited", when in fact it's not. You don't even have small print to cover yourself. What if one of your customers end up taking you to court for breach of contract, of does your contract explain what you have just pointed out?

Why are you treating a random developer at a hosting company like he's the CEO? If Dreamhost gets taken to court, it's not his problem. He is just explaining what he actually does to make "unlimited" as unlimited as possible.

Company legal policies are not his domain, so it's probably a waste of effort to complain to him about it.

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

#72

Post by felixge »

acangiano wrote: post #4

On 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.

Just a few fun experiences I had with vps.net:

* A server reset itself to a 3 month old backup overnight, their support was unable to explain it.

* Random disk I/O issues bringing throughput to * My favorite: Some internal routing issue on their end would randomly route my ssh attempts to another machine on their network. Their solution? Grant me access to this machine which was rented by another customer!

Oh and of course, there was plenty of downtime thrown in for good measure.

That being said: I really like their offering in theory, I just wish they could pull it off in practice.

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

#73

Post by joshfraser »

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…

UK2 is a reseller of SoftLayer. SoftLayer have been pretty reputable up to this point and many large companies use them. SoftLayer also offers unlimited bandwidth but charges an extra $2,000 for it. It appears UK2/100TB are the shady ones here, although SoftLayer may have had a hand in shutting them down due to the competitive nature of their product.

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

#74

Post by enjo »

jonknee wrote: post #48
citricsquid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

both visa and mastercard had their payment processing servers down along with their websites.

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

I'll vouch for that. We had no issues at all. Ran a lot of transactions throughout the period as well.

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

#75

Post by brown9-2 »

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…

"They are making boat loads of money http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=AMZN+vs+GS+vs+GOOG "

I'm not sure what the point of comparing Amazon to Goldman and Google, as the latter two are way more profitable than Amazon is. Is the comparison to show that they're in the same league as these two companies, or are you just looking at the stock price alone?

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

#76

Post by tybris »

brown9-2 wrote: post #75
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…

"They are making boat loads of money http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=AMZN+vs+GS+vs+GOOG " I'm not sure what the point of comparing Amazon to Goldman and Google, as the latter two are way more profitable than Amazon is. Is the comparison to show that they're in the same league as these two companies, or are you just looking at the stock price alone?

Mostly revenue / employee, stock price.

Bezos' lack of interest in profit is well-known, e.g. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.... (2006).

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

#77

Post by andfarm »

cmelbye wrote: post #41
andfarm wrote: post #37

Earlier 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 we're up against is that providing raw numbers for usage limits leads to several problems. Among them:

1. Competition. If you provide N gigabytes of storage/bandwidth, another provider will offer N * 2, and they instantly look more competitive, even if they aren't even actually capable of providing that. So, back when we provided limited plans, we were constantly being forced to increase our resource promises to unrealistic levels just to avoid looking stingy.

2. Expectations. If you provide N gigabytes of whatever, customers will expect (and demand!) that their site be able to use up all of their provided resources. This is both on a policy level ("what do you mean I saturated the interface?") and on a technical level ("why can't I serve 100 gigabytes of dynamic HTML a month?") This becomes an increasing issue as competition drives the provides up, and the actual resources you're supposed to provide are absurdly high. (Consider for instance 100tb.com, which was mentioned earlier in this thread - good luck actually pushing 300+ MBit constantly.)

In practice, the policy we've got now actually works better in some ways for customers because they don't have to care whether they're exceeding resource limits, either subjective OR objective. So long as they're running a site which complies with our Terms of Service, we'll do our best to keep it going, even if it gets big.

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

#78

Post by andfarm »

xd wrote: post #43
andfarm wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

I'm curious, why don't you state limits on your site? You state "unlimited", when in fact it's not. You don't even have small print to cover yourself. What if one of your customers end up taking you to court for breach of contract, of does your contract explain what you have just pointed out?

Our limits are based on policy, not numbers. The policy is (roughly) outlined at http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html if you're curious.

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

#79

Post by andfarm »

Groxx wrote: post #70
dedward wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

With those sorts of numbers (100 tb/day ≈ 10 Gbps, for instance), nobody can offer that amount of traffic under "unlimited" terms. One of the limitations I mentioned is that we won't upgrade infrastructure just to support individual customers, and this would definitely fall under those criteria.

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

#80

Post by jjoe »

This is a disgusting action from UK2/SL.

If you promise 100TB of data transfer on 1Gbps, you have to keep your word (not matter what). Otherwise, don't venture in offering such deal. Essentially, they're kicking out the tail end of the "distribution". A lot of SL clients have been reporting network latency and sometimes packet drops over the last few months. SL is most likely seeing this in their MRTG graphs and have no choice but to enforce the ToS, which does have a CDN clause by the way. The right approach would be to expand their network and purchase additional bandwidth. But I guess they're there to increase their margins.

I have to confess that, as a provider, one has to anticipate things like this for the sake of keeping the business afloat and the clients. The upstream could at any moment pull the plug on you (literally). There's so much one has to watch out for. These are things one loses sleep over.

It's unsettling to say the least. I'm reevaluating SL/UK2 as a possible partner (it used to be high up there in the list but no more).

Regards

Joe

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