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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

#81

Post by Groxx »

andfarm wrote: post #79
Groxx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.

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

#83

Post by danbmil99 »

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…

One thing I'll say for Amazon is the explicitness of the cost for storage and bandwidth, coupled with the simple fact that my (and your) startup are very unlikely to get anywhere close to something they haven't seen, make AWS extremely attractive for any real deployment.

We had a Dreamhost account (have!), and briefly entertained using them for our rollout, but some simple number crunching and common sense made us see that Amazon was set up for the possibility that we would really have to scale, whereas Dreamhost was pretty much set up for casual work-at-home developers who were looking for absolute rock-bottom costs.

Seems like the simpleCDN guys made the opposite decision, and went with a company that markets XYZ rather than really looking under the hood. It's incumbent on any business to vette their vendors and understand the risks, rather than just point a finger and say "they promised!"

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

#84

Post by dnsworks »

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…

"* 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, but we won't install new hardware just for you."

Could you define an "illegitimate use of resources"?

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

#85

Post by redthrowaway »

andfarm wrote: post #77
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 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…

I get that there's a strong disincentive to be the first company to impose caps, but would a court order not level the playing field? Or would everybody simply host overseas?

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

#86

Post by xd »

jrockway wrote: post #71
xd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see your point. But I didn't realise he was a developer, from the way he was talking, it sounded like he was in a position of authority at the company.

I see how you figured out he was an employee now, I'll be sure to do profile checks on people in the future to get a better frame of reference.

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

#87

Post by bmelton »

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…

I beg to differ. I know that I've been well within the terms of service at all times, hosting only a semi-popular message board. I'll grant you that 30Gb of traffic in a month is doing well, however, that certainly comes nowhere close to saturating the network or filling the filesystem.

From your TOS, I should be fine so long as the intent of the site wasn't to do either.

For what it's worth, I generally recommend Dreamhost to people looking for small personal sites or new apps -- until they need to move, but it's my experience with DH that eventually they will need to move. As I've experienced on more than one occasion, the limits, ignoring the Unlimited + 50Gb claim, are enforced far more vigorously than you claim.

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

#88

Post by ErrantX »

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.

It was a relatively isolated problem in some parts of the UK I think (I was able to buy stuff during the supposed outage over here).

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

#89

Post by andfarm »

Groxx wrote: post #81
andfarm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.

I'm not sure I can give out exact numbers, but it's far in excess of what any single machine can push out, either practically or technically. Advertising it would be just as misleading as any other specific number. :)

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

#90

Post by Groxx »

andfarm wrote: post #89
Groxx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.

I'm not sure I can give out exact numbers, but it's far in excess of what any single machine can push out, either practically or technically. Advertising it would be just as misleading as any other specific number. :)

>That's the limit (unless limited further by something else).

>... what any single machine can push out ...

That number wouldn't be very misleading, and could actually be useful - it's effectively the limit on a dumb fileserver. If their code results in a lower boundary, that's their fault, not yours, and not in the least incorrect because it's being restricted by them.

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