Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses 163
BlueToast writes "Hosting giants SoftLayer, ThePlanet, Hosting Services Inc., and UK2 Group are teaming up to wipe out small competitors like SimpleCDN. Though ThePlanet isn't directly involved in the slicing of SimpleCDN's throat, ThePlanet runs the sales chat scripts for SoftLayer (check your NoScript). As a loyal customer of SimpleCDN, I really do not appreciate the disruption of service to a company I have been with for over a year. SimpleCDN's president wrote, 'Absolutely no valid reason or warning was or has been given for this termination, and our best guess currently is that these organizations could not provide the services that we contracted and paid for, so instead they decided that terminating services would be the best solution for them.'"
Actually (Score:4, Informative)
Softlayer and ThePlanet merged a few months ago. And UK2/"Hosting Services"/100TB simply resells Softlayer's services.
100TB has a bandwidth pool deal with Softlayer, then oversells like mad. SimpleCDN used 100TB [I -believe-] to get excellent bandwidth deals.
Seems like 100TB [and perhaps Softlayer] weren't happy with this.
Re:Actually (Score:4, Informative)
--- Obviously there are two sides to this story, and hopefully we will get a chance to air ours. For now, I can only say that we are sorry about the problems this may have caused to anyone, but that it was out of our hands. Best, Ditlev ---
So who exactly forced UK2 to shutdown SimpleCDN? Was it SoftLayer?
Time will tell - but so far it seems Frank Wilson has been telling SimpleCDN's side of the story truthfully from day one.
People have been having a hard time believing that some sort of "conspiracy" exists to remove SimpleCDN from the marketplace - but each passing hour seems to support this more and more.
What does this mean for the thousands of hosting companies that rely on infrastructure providers like SoftLayer?
Again I want to remind our 5,000+ customers that our entire support staff is available to help transition to other CDN providers, and we'll do everything and anything that we can to help during this terrible situation.
Re:Actually (Score:5, Funny)
how can they make any money selling for $10000 what SoftLayer directly charges $50000 for?
They lose money on each unit but they make it up through volume.
Re:Actually (Score:5, Interesting)
Except they don't. Because it's impossible.
Bandwidth isn't something you can just oversell without consequence; if you have a massive overage from people actually using what they are paying for then you are probably out of business.
See, I think what happened here is that 100tb had a massive overage and found out that SimpleCDN was one of their big players and they are frantically trying to get the big guys off their bandwidth pool so that they can hedge against the overage while already having SimpleCDN's money. This would fit into my projections for the original business model of 10tb.com before they became 100tb. At least with 10tb there was some sign of it being at least somewhat realistic; with 100tb there is no way.
Or... let's think of it this way:
Say you buy a server from 100TB for $201.95/mo (baseline server with 100TB bandwidth). This works out to being ~303mbps 95% on a typical burst pattern (and likely much higher for streaming traffic!). The server probably costs $100/mo just to run, leaving $101.95 for bandwidth (in this example we're not making any profit mind you!).
This means that your ~303mbps 95% breaks down to $0.33/mbps.
Not even BANDCON [attrition.org] can hit that price point and they go really, really low.
This business model does not make sense to me. There is very high risk and I see no way that they can hedge against overages if everyone actually opens up and uses all of their 100tb allotment. Maybe they are paying by GB instead of mbps but that makes no sense because then SoftLayer would be holding the bill and frankly I don't think they are that stupid.
So no, it's not possible to make up profit through volume on this when you keep in mind the risk you are hedging. It's just too much of a gamble for any sane business operator to even consider.
Re: (Score:2)
Except they don't. Because it's impossible.
Duh? That sound you heard when making this post was the whooshing of the joke over your head.
Buy at a loss, make it up in volume... (Score:4, Informative)
No... in the case of bandwidth, you can actually do this, and I think that was the point. My ISP does this all the time. It's because "bandwidth" is a damned flaky metric in the consumer space. I pay for 10 mb/sec (supposedly) DSL but rarely, if ever, do I actually get that -- even locally, from home to business -- because they grossly oversell the capacity they actually have in place. My ISP specifically says in the service agreement that they don't have to supply the designated plan bandwidth, and if you can't connect as you need to, tough cookies. Legalese to that effect. I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that if you added up the bandwidth my ISP sells against the pipe they actually have, you'd find a mismatch of several orders of magnitude. This allows them to sell bandwidth for less than they pay for it by making it up in volume -- it's an inferior product, that's all.
Re: (Score:2)
As a sysadmin at an ISP, if you can't get your rated speed over your DSL connection, the problem is probably signal quality over the telco connection --- rated DSL speeds are the best you can get with clean, short line, and go down with noise and distance. It's just the way the technology works, trying to squeeze bits over wires that were never designed for bits.
It is possible that the link to the telco is saturated, or their upstream connection. If so, there are generally a number of ISPs servicing a tel
Re: (Score:3)
They have a bandwidth pooling agreement.
As for SoftLayer, their goal is quite simply to generate more sales channels. That's why most of the big DCs tolerate reselling and even encourage it. Like I said, the business model works to a certain point but then totally breaks down as the risk gets higher.
Re:Actually (Score:4)
sounds just like your average financial institution
Re:Actually (Score:4, Informative)
Our goal is to keep our commitments to our customers, and if we can't we'll do whatever we can to help them secure alternative services.
We appreciate other CDNs who have offered our customers discounted pricing, and have made their sales teams available on the weekend to turn new customers up right away.
Our only goal is to help them. We've emailed, we've posted - and we're still receiving frantic calls asking why the service isn't working. We're using any and all channels to communicate with our customers.
Re:Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it matter what they're going to use their paid-for internet to watch? Would it have been any better for GP to say "for their pr0n addiction"? Or "to download the latest leaks from wikileaks"? Or "to download security fixes for their Ubuntu systems"? Really, this could be a text-book case of "They came for the X, but I'm not an X, so I said nothing." And you're not merely doing nothing, you're cheering them on because you're not an X?
Unfortunate (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunate But Wait... (Score:4, Informative)
Again, more emails from Ditlev and UK2...
"We have no problem with anyone doing 100tb/month - month after month, our business model fully support that"
The 100TB website still advertises 100TBs of transfer with each server, along with "As you would expect unmetered bandwidth from 100TB is truly unmetered and unshared, with no limits and no small print. Unmetered servers use exactly the same SoftLayer network as their 100TB equivalents and are fitted with 1000Mbit ports."
So 100TB is still advertising and selling this service to others, but for some reason SimpleCDN is turned off? Why was SimpleCDN singled out, while this "offer" is still being made to others?
Why was the service provided for months, until one day a demand was sent requiring us to immediately shutdown all servers?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
You'll never get an explanation because you won't get off your chair to demand one.
Do it, you'll be surprised at the results if you press hard enough.
Re: (Score:3)
UK2 also confirmed to us many times that their business model fully supports 100TBs of transfer, and SimpleCDN has been utilizing these servers for many months now without problem.
Why didn't you look at their business model directly? What you were getting would cost at least 5 times more directly from SoftLayer...
Re:Unfortunate But Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
I spent 7+ years in the hosting industry. I can tell you right now that when Ditlev said his model "fully supports" customers doing 100TB month over month, my "bullshit meter" went through the roof. At best that was a simplification of his business model (sure, ONE customer can do 100TB month over month, as long as 100 other customer's don't - or perhaps he means 'sure, you can do 100TB for 3 months, as long as you don't use your server at all the other 9 months of the year').
So here's the real deal for you. The cheapest bandwidth I've ever heard of, ever, in the hosting industry was about 2 dollars/megabit, and this was NOT premium bandwidth, and it was single provider (Cogent). That price was let slip on the WHT forum, in fact, so I'm not giving away any privileged non-public information. Chances are good the top companies get even cheaper pricing (bigger than hosting providers) plus even hosting providers these days do a lot of peering to try to cut costs. But they also typically offer blended bandwidth from multiple providers (upping their cost/megabit), so the math below is still probably being too nice to them.
But let's go with this $2/mbit. There are 1000 megabits in a gigabit. That's $2000/month for a gigabit line. Now at best, a gigabit line can do 125 MB/s (in one direction - and since most these high-end bandwidth deals are typically charging on only the busier direction with the other way being 'free', that works for this example). 125 MB/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days = 324,000,000 MB / 1024 = 316,406.25 GB / 1024 = 308.99 TB. That's 308.99 TB for $2000. $2000 / 308.99.
That's $6.47 per TB. They're offering 100 TB. That's $647 COST per server (and I'm not even including the cost of the actual hardware here; that $201.15 lowest-cost server on their site is a quad core Xeon 3220 box that has some cost attached to it, and it eats power which has cost attached to it, plus you've got to factor in support burdern, infrastructure burden, etc, but hey, let's say by magic that's all free!).
Each server UK2 runs at that price is costing them 3x what they made on it in revenue, minimum.
Generally this works because every individual customer is not pushing 125 MB/s 24x7. Not even close. Most probably don't even push a third, so they're flat-out profitable. Others don't even push a tenth, others, not even 1 TB (I know this to be true personally, as I have a buddy with a 100TB server who does not push 1 TB a month - he's on 100TB because they actually had one of the best deals on a dedicated server from a cost per MB of RAM and HZ of CPU, on TOP of the 100 TB of 'free' bandwidth). They're making their money, like (news flash) EVERY OTHER HOSTING COMPANY - overselling. Do not listen to them say they can totally make money if every customer pushes max each month. They can't.
You want proof they can't? SimpleCDN represents a high-usage customer; possibly even approaching the 100TB on each server, if their software was good enough to not have CPU/RAM be the bottleneck. A CDN or other content streaming site is probably the single worst customer I can think of for an overselling operation; and lo and behold, they've been shut off. Case closed - they cannot actually provide every customer 100 TB a month. They can provide a certain % of their total customer base 100 TB a month, and then it's not profitable anymore.
Good news for all the rest of 100 TB's customers is that with SimpleCDN gone, now there's probably more chance of them getting away with 100 TB/month for a few months without being shut off. :)
Now to be clear, I'm pinpointing UK2 group here, but this could be Softlayer. If UK2 group is getting a super deal on bandwidth from Softlayer and it's Softlayer who is essentially overselling (plausible), then they're the ones likely pushing for the shutdown of SimpleCDN. Whoever's business model actually has the oversell in it (or both of them) is the one who's happiest to see SimpleCDN go.
Truth is, a company as large as SimpleCDN s
Not singled out (Score:3)
You were not singled out. At least not "just you". A number of websites have been pulled over the last few weeks. The excuses vary. Some of these sites complain publicly on webhostingtalk.com where you can read more, others have quietly moved their website after an unexplained service interruption. They're simply removing anyone who uses too much data (which can be less than the 100TB advertised), causes too many DMCA related work (some services are prone to DMCA notices, UK2 refuses to state what they cons
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
SimpleCDN are saying that the ToS were changed specifically to shut them down. I imagine you're quoting from the new ToS.
I presume the ToS also say that they have the right to change them unilaterally without notice. Maybe we'll finally get a court ruling on whether that's legal or not.
So what? (Score:2)
SimpleCDN are saying that the ToS were changed specifically to shut them down. I imagine you're quoting from the new ToS.
There is nothing wrong with this idea. If I run a business and at some point I decide that I can not (or simply don't want to) support a certain type of customer, there is nor reason I should have to. Businesses modify their TOS and biz models all the time to address issues that come up that perhaps they had not forseen.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there is plenty wrong, if you have signed a contract with the customer saying you will sell your service to them you can't just go and change your mind later and say you'll take their money but don't have to give them service because you dreamed up some new rule after they paid you. It's utter crap, how can you not see this?
Don't think for a instant that I disagree with you, but unfortunately there's a big difference between what is right, and what "is"
Right now just about every TOS type document has "we reserve the right to alter this agreement without notice at any time" clauses. It is time to test that, though. Just because you were arbitrarily forced to agree to something to use a service, doesn't mean it will stand up in court.
Re: (Score:2)
Right now just about every TOS type document has "we reserve the right to alter this agreement without notice at any time" clauses. It is time to test that, though. Just because you were arbitrarily forced to agree to something to use a service, doesn't mean it will stand up in court.
Such a clause should never exist in a business-to-business contract. It's the first thing we negotiate away, fixing the terms of the deal into the document itself. Including copies of the AUP in effect at the time of contract signing.
We're a small company, and even our major vendors know that the "we can change terms whenever" thing doesn't fly in B2B contracts. Our contracts with Microsoft, Rackspace, and Adobe all have fixed terms.
Now, if SimpleCDN had a fixed-terms contract with their datacenter vendors
Re: (Score:2)
That's all well and good, but one clause that's always been there is that customers may not resell Softlayer services at less than their own list price. One would conjecture then that if SimpleCDN costed less than CDNLayer, that would run afoul of that rule.
Re: (Score:2)
In my mind, SimpleCDN is the one who screwed up. For any company trying to start a busness (espically one like this), who signs up with a provider and allows that provider to change the terms of service without any warning?!? If my business depends on your service, you better bet that my contract with you either clearly outlines the terms of service (and only allows them to be modifiable by an amendment to the contract), or at the worst, provide a 90-day change window.
I know we can't all be lawyers, but d
After reading that story three times (Score:5, Insightful)
I still have absolutely no frigging idea what it's about.
Re: (Score:2)
It's about advertising for SimpleCDN.
Re:After reading that story three times (Score:4, Interesting)
We are out of business here, and are doing right by our customers moving them to our competitors. We're not selling anything or taking orders.
This is about something much larger - infrastructure providers terminating services with no notice and no reason.
It could happen to anyone for any reason. You thought your dedicated server was safe - but think again.
Re:After reading that story three times (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think little more broadly, you'll soon come to realize there are very few entities in this world that could be counted as "real providers" as you seem to mean it. Almost whatever you (as in person, company or otherwise), you're always depending on someone else to provide you the infrastructure to allow you to do it. Very few "real providers" provide the food for their employees, commuting infrastructure for getting to work, or - if you want something closer to average IT business - electricity.
Practically all of us will always be at mercy of someone offering us the infrastructure to do what we are doing, and western societies (well, most societies) are built on such infrastructure deals. If we can't be reasonably sure we'll be getting the infrastructure service we have paid for and have reason to expect, this society will soon start looking lot different than it does at the moment. This being IT business is no excuse for the expectations suddenly be lot lower.
Re:After reading that story three times (Score:4, Insightful)
Either be the real provider or be held at the mercies of your suppliers. YOU should have known that. It's certainly the case in almost every business.
On the internet, everybody is at the mercy of their suppliers. Even the tier1s. The largest ISPs are all below 10% traffic. That's why Google has invested so heavily in networking and why net nutrality is such a hot topic. If everybody else cut you off at the same time you would be dead. It's clear, however, that they should have had at least three cloud suppliers. I'm guessing that SimpleCDN was simply too new to have got that properly set up (we all take big risks at the start of a business; there's no other way).
It's your problem, too (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, that's your problem.
Either be the real provider or be held at the mercies of your suppliers. YOU should have known that. It's certainly the case in almost every business.
Thank you, Mr. Genius. Did you know that Slashdot uses hosting services, so technically, it's at the mercy of its provider. They should know this. So if their provider suddenly decides to take down their servers, hey, that's Slashdot's problem, right? I run some gaming web sites, with Linode as my hosting provider. If Linode suddenly decides to shut down my servers without warning, I suppose that would be my own damn fault, right?
Okay, so let's take this to its logical conclusion. That means that really, when you think about it, the only people who should be trusted as hosting providers are the massive telecoms, right? Because they're the only ones who can really guarantee that no upstream provider will shut down your service, since they own the wires that go to your house.
That's a brilliant solution, consolidate all service in the hands of one or two companies. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
Oh wait, AT&T depends on its wire suppliers, which depends on miners in Chile, who depend on wheat growers in Russia... Looks like we need to just consolidate the whole damn world into the hands of AT&T and let them rule us as dictators...
Re: (Score:2)
"Because they're the only ones who can really guarantee that no upstream provider will shut down your service, since they own the wires that go to your house."
Oh that's dead wrong and you damn well know it. Go read the Telecommunications act of 1996 - WE OWN THE INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH OUR TAX DOLLARS.
We aren't the real providers because the telecoms have taken our property from us and are charging us to use our own paid-for infrastructure.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I'd say they're a LOT different from Akamai. Akamai is a gigantic company with direct peering arrangements with virtually every Tier 1 operator on the planet, and cache clusters physically located within the NOC of a giant majority of the ISPs on Earth as well.
Also, Akamai has drafted contracts with their suppliers, and a legal team to back it up if all else fails.
Re:After reading that story three times (Score:4, Informative)
I've been up for about 72 hours straight helping customers move to CloudFront and MaxCDN, and just happened to refresh
How do you say that we "over use" bandwidth? We purchase dedicated servers from a company that provides 100TBs of bandwidth with each server, and the majority of our servers use MUCH LESS than 100TBs of bandwidth. This is the service that has been sold to us, so how are we "over using" bandwidth? Again UK2 did confirm that their business model fully supports offering 100TBs of bandwidth with each server. And again, we're using much less.
If they can't provide this service, then why are they offering it? Why did they terminate SimpleCDN, but continue to offer the service to others, knowing they can't provide it?
Why did UK2 say the decision was "out of their hands"? Did SoftLayer force them to shutdown SimpleCDN? But then why SimpleCDN? Why not all of their customers doing 100TBs on their servers?
So many questions, and so far no answers from the "giants".
Thanks,
John
SimpleCDN Support
Re: (Score:2)
To deflect your anger.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're going to be a troll, don't be a coward.
Please read up on how overselling works; the masses overpay a little (for peace of mind) to cover the loss from heavy users.
This model can work well, and is how cable and telephone companies operate.
They are a sham the same way every single telephone, cable and internet providers is shamming.
You think you're so cool using non-oversold bandwidth?
Newsflash: Even upstream ISPs oversell as well.
The world is better off without amateurs like you raking this generat
Re: (Score:2)
So what you're saying is that they should either get out the garden spade and personally bury a fiber to every home themselves of STFU?
That's not how civilization works. We all have to depend on others to some degree. It's important enough that in our heyday we actually had government agencies making sure that people didn't make offers they couldn't actually make good on (or at least that they wouldn't continue doing that). It's too bad we're in decline now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and our customers will back that up.
Not after this, probably.
You need multiple geograpically-dispersed dedicated data centres, multiple
backhauls, redundancy all the way through - the whole nine yards. You need
to hold the SLA's to the network providers yourselves, or you can't control
what is happening - in short, with dedicated servers, you have no control
whatsoever over what happens once the packet leaves your ethernet card.
You're trying to deliver a service that requires a multi-million dollar
investment to get it done right, on the cheap. An
Re: (Score:2)
"Sorry, but you are a bunch of amateurs - that's all there is to it."
Because they depend on third parties? Surely so you do and so do everybody in business.
Provided (a big "if") their contract clearly stated they were offered 100TB per server, it would be the provider unable to hold to their contract the amateurish one (if not blatantly illegal).
I would look for legal advice since it seems they should be able to claim for contract breaching and damages for the lost business revenue on top of that.
Re: (Score:3)
Because they depend on third parties?
Nope, because they depend on a single third party. They they had depended on third parties, then having one party yank their service would have resulted in (temporarily) degraded service, not in it completely vanishing.
Re: (Score:2)
I think they have a right to complain.
They do, I'm sure. To their lawyers. It's not Slashdot worthy.
Sure it is. Don't try to decide what is worthy of the interest of others.
I find this story very interesting, I sympathize with the complainants at SimpleCDN and wish a swift and virulent Ebola infection on the creeps at SoftLayer, ThePlanet, Hosting Services Inc., and UK2 Group.
Advanced notice of the termination of services should have been given, to at least give people a chance to minimize the disruption. Treating it like a "TOS violation" when they altered the TOS after the agreement is both dishonest an
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in the managed hosting industry (including some CDN services), we have our own cages, with our own racks, with our own servers, our own routers, and our own connections to various providers in geographically diverse locations. We have our own ASNs, and IP address space.
What *exactly* was your product? What *exactly* does your company even own? It sounds like you were just reselling the equivalent of a poorly constructed reverse squid proxy cluster. You had no binding contracts with your provider? Do
Re:After reading that story three times (Score:5, Insightful)
You were good till you called them a parasite on the network.
Are customers obligated to pay money all the while fearing to actually use what the parties agreed on?
Re: (Score:3)
Any reasonable person realizes the difference between a business and consumer service. 10/100/1000 tb.com is obviously a 'consumer' service. Reselling it (and screwing with their business model in the process) is pretty obviously going to get you terminated at some point.
This is no different than cellular phone service, or buy 1 get 1 free (limit 5 per customer) at the local grocery store.
No, they ($cellcompany, Grocery store, 100tb.com) can't actually afford for each customer to use their full capacity all
Re: (Score:3)
AA do, indeed, bet their business on obtaining jet fuel, maintenance, drinks, snacks and so on. And when the fuel truck doesn't turn up because their supplier webt bust overnight, they have a contingency plan, because otherwise they would be Very Stupid.
After reading you comment three times (Score:5, Interesting)
You ignorant tool, have you ever submitted a story to Slashdot? If you had, you'd know that they don't hit the front page right away. Sometimes it's hours later, many times it's days. If you do post a story, it's not like you sit there, wait a few minutes, and then start replying to people, because you may very well be sitting there for days.
I'm guessing that "BlueToast," whoever that is, even if it is a sockpuppet, as you so flagrantly accuse him/her of being, likely posted this in the middle of the day or early evening. It hit the front page at 5:11am US Eastern/2:11am US Pacific time. Given that the story is about a U.S. provider, I'm guessing BlueToast is probably sound asleep right now, and SimpleCDNNOC's claim that he/she is up in the middle of the night working for his/her customers not only plausible, but probable.
By the way, on what are you basing your accusation of "flagrant over-use of bandwidth?" Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers? Do you have the metrics showing how much bandwidth they're using, and how much is/was available?
Slashdot is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Let's see... News? Yes, I think this is pretty damn newsworthy. For nerds? Well, it's squarely in the IT/technical realm, so yeah, I think that it would be of interest to nerds. Stuff? It's definitely stuff. That matters? Well, if you're one of SimpleCDN's thousands of customers, or someone who consumes those customer's content or data, or if the submitter is right in that this activity may spread to other hosting providers (which it sounds like it may), then that would be a big green checkmark in that column as well.
I could just as easily accuse you of being a sockpuppet for one of the nasty evil companies that is screwing SimpleCDN, posting on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward to try to add insult to the injury you've already caused, and my accusation will be just as valid and appropriate as your little rant.
I guess that's just a long way of saying Anonymous Coward - if you think this story isn't worth reading, then don't comment. If you can't do that. STFU. Now get off our grass!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers?
Well that is clearly the problem. SimpleCDN had no such contract, other than un-negotiated, one-sided, "we can change this at any time" terms of service you get with cheap-ass hosting accounts.
Honestly, that's no way to run a business. Even if you had a fuckton of redundancy, and used three separate cheap-ass hosting providers for each of your POPs, you're still running a huge amount of risk having no contract with your primary suppliers, especially when they merge with each other and shoot your redundancy
Re: (Score:2)
Why is it over-use when you accept an offer from someone and then ask them to actually perform as offered?
To go with the auto analogy, you go to the gas station and see on the sign that gas is $2.50/gallon. So you go to the cashier and say you want 10 gallons and hand her $25. All's well so far. You then start pumping the gas and to your surprise the pump stops after 7 gallons. You go back inside to get either your remaining 3 gallons or $7.50 for the gas you didn't get and the cashier treats you like a thi
Re: (Score:2)
Real nerds who spend their days up to their elbows in Internet plumbing knew exactly what it was about at first glance.
Re: (Score:2)
Softlayer doesn't have plans promising 100TB a month. And Softlayer didn't terminate services - the agreement is between SimpleCDN and 100TB.com (UK2 Group).
I should clarify that by saying you could buy 100TB a month from Softlayer, but it'd cost you $10,000 per month and I doubt they'd kick a customer paying that sort of dosh.
There is something missing here (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is something missing here (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously UK2 is not sane...
"We are unable to continue allowing our clients to run CDN services within our 100TB network. We are currently updating our Terms of Service to include this requirement for all clients. I would ask that you immediately comply with this new policy update; otherwise we will be required to disable your services. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you."
There you have it. First communication includes an immediate demand to terminate service, and oh yeah, they are "updating" their ToS.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean if you don't believe it you don't believe it, but again there it is right in front of you.
Re: (Score:2)
If you'd read the email, which as an AC I can't assume you did, you'd see that the supplier's email stated that they had suddenly decided that CDN services were not welcome on their network, regardless of whether they were overusing bandwidth or not.
If it made sense... (Score:3)
Sorry, I don't believe you. It just doesn't make sense.
If it made sense, SimpleCDN probably wouldn't be in this situation and it probably wouldn't be posted on Slashdot, duh.
I'll tell you what, since you're so hell-bent on convincing yourself and everyone else that SimpleCDN is outright lying to everyone, why don't you get off your butt and you find out the other half of the story? I can pretty much guarantee that if you're right, that SimpleCDN is deliberately misleading everyone in some insane attempt to drum up more business by--am I understanding this righ
Re: (Score:2)
Even better why don't we stop caring about SimpleCDN entirely (worse things have happened in the world in the last few days, apparently) and when we look for own hosting we choose providers who look like they're going to last the course and ignore the "more traffic than you can shake a stick at for a penny" providers.
I would never trust anyone who was reselling services from those clowns at UK2 because I don't trust UK2 any more than I can throw them.
People should just go and host with a different company,
Re: (Score:2)
People should just go and host with a different company, chalk this one up to experience and not expect to get everything for oh so very little and still expect the same quality of service as they might get from the big players.
Right. Let's just consolidate all hosting into the hands of one or two "big players." What could possibly go wrong?
Re: (Score:2)
No, let's just not use cheap and cheerful providers and then expect the world in return.
Re: (Score:2)
No, let's just not use cheap and cheerful providers and then expect the world in return.
Why do you think contracts exist?
If I have a contract with SimpleCDN that is favorable to me, and they go out of business, then I'm SOL. I'll have to find another provider.
But if SimpleCDN has a contract with whoever is responsible for this SNAFU that is favorable to SimpleCDN, and whoever that is not only stays in business but continues to offer the same service to others that they are contractually obligated to provide to SimpleCDN, that's a problem that needs to be rectified. Just because a contract is
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Interesting that you don't know whether contractual obligations have or have not been met in the case of SimpleCDN's termination.
Maybe you should hold fire until you know more about this story?
Unless you're a SimpleCDN customer in which case I suggest you find more reliable hosting elsewhere!
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Interesting that you don't know whether contractual obligations have or have not been met in the case of SimpleCDN's termination.
No, but given the choice between believing that a company broke an unfavorable contract or SimpleCDN is outright lying to us in the e-mails and responses they've shown, I tend to believe the former.
I could make the same argument, that it's interesting that you'd rather believe that SimpleCDN is not just misrepresenting something, but outright lying about its communication.
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Not really. I am just curiously amused by the concern towards this company when concern is almost certainly better directed elsewhere.
Some company gets its hosting terminated because the supplier is playing "maximise the profit margins".
This isn't special or unusual. /. loves siding with the little guy against the big guy so I can understand why they'd spend time trying to get support on here.
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No because the contract that I had regarding buying the car would let me sue them.
If you think this makes no sense in the context of the SimpleCDN issue that is because your analogy makes absolutely no sense in the context of the SimpleCDN issue.
They are a business so should have had proper business-like arrangements for contingencies or some other sort of cover in the case of having, for exampe, their entire business yanked out from underneath them.
what doesnt make sense you tool (Score:2)
thats all that is there to it. FRAUD. simple as that.
Re:There is something missing here (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard all terminated their dealings with WikiLeaks, right?
They weren't presented with any kind of court order telling them to do so, so obviously they chose to do it on their own.
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Ok, you have a point there, but Wikileaks is a very special case. I meant to describe the usual business practice.
To be more specific yet, I mean the usual business practice in the hosting industry.
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"My gut feeling agrees with the AC that over-use of bandwidth may be the case."
I hear about "bandwidth over-use" once and again, but how the hell could anyone over use a resource provided on-demand? In this case, the network provider have all the ability, even on the cheap ,to control their customers' resource usage. If they contracted 1TB/month per server, how could they be able to use one single bit more than this? The provider could just say "see? 1TB; you are off till next month the first" a simple
dont buy it (Score:2)
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Well UK2 today said that the decision "... was out of our hands." So who would that leave?
I wouldn't blindly trust someone making that claim. That could mean just about anything. "Out of our hands" could also mean that their corporate mandate is to make as much money as possible, and the bandwidth you're using (and, I assume, contractually allowed to use) could be more profitably allocated to other customers. Therefore, they regret that they're going to have to break their contract and shut you down. It's "out of their hands" only in the sense that it's "in the hands" of their investors.
I'm
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Large companies will generally consult lawyers and accountants before breaking a contract, to discover whether the cost from legal fees and penalty clauses will be greater than the cost of the breach. If the contract is well-written, then it will be and they will usually make the rational decision not to. In this case, it doesn't appear to be a contract at all. They had the same sort of one-sided agreement that anyone who goes to a cheap hosting company has, which doesn't provide any guarantees and allow
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It might leave governmental action.
Department of Homeland security gave them a 'switch off, or you're going to jail' order.
Options (Score:2, Informative)
Unless SimpleCDN is quite lucky or was rather careful, the contract the agreement with the hosting company could be terminated at will presumably with return of money for future service. After all if you can write such a contract and get people to agree to it, you really should since it protects you against all kinds of things. However, for breach of contract things they'll have to look to lawyers which is unlikely to them, or anyone else, any good.
If the reason for the termination is related to Softlayer w
Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't use SimpleCDN because they're gone.
I can't use Amazon's CDN because they're jerks to wikileaks.
I can't use VPS.net's (UK2/100TB) CDN because they're jerks to SimpleCDN.
I can't use anyone who runs Softlayer's CDN because they're in kahoots with UK2.
I can't use anyone who runs Layer3 because they gave in to Comcast (netflix story from a while back) and will probably jack up my prices.
I can't use Akamai because I don't have deep pockets.
If Google comes up with a CDN I can't use them because they steal everyone's privacy.
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Or build your own. (Score:2)
Buy a bunch of cheap VPSes around the country/world, a Maxmind license, and have a ball.
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Limelight.
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I've been using MaxCDN for more than an year. So far it works just fine.
Switched to Hetzner.de, never looked back (Score:3)
I used to host with ThePlanet for my websites. Though their services were pretty stable, they charge so much that I looked for other vendors after a couple of years. Switched this year to Hetzner.de. They provide a dedicated server [hetzner.de] for 49 EUR that gives me i7-920 quad core, 8 GB of RAM, 2 * 750 GB of disk space and 5 TB of bandwidth per month. Plus they have a great web-based system for remote rescue, reboots, and all services that run on the machine are now available on native IPv6. I haven't had any hiccups so far, and it seems well worth the money.
Their support staff seem to struggle a little bit with English, but their web-based rescue interface leaves little to ask the service staff about.
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In reply to my own comment, I sound like a shill.. I wish I could delete the parent comment.
I pay Hetzner ;) and they have done well to be appreciated. Websites I host on this box include banu.com [banu.com] and mukund.org [mukund.org].
Hetzner.de (Score:2)
Where are the servers located? Their own in Germany? Or reselling US-based?
Also, does Banu or Mukund require enough resources to warrant your own server, as opposed to shared hosting?
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Apologies for the delay in replying.
Where are the servers located? Their own in Germany? Or reselling US-based?
They run their own datacenters in Germany. Check their website for details.
Also, does Banu or Mukund require enough resources to warrant your own server, as opposed to shared hosting?
Banu is a company. We serve the main HTTPS website, DNS, email, XMPP chat, mailman lists, bugzilla, git repositories, rsync for /pub, run virtual machines for builds, run other bits like IRC bots, bittorrent tracker + seed for large files, shells for people, etc. We are also working on a shop section.
Granted some of these can be done using free services on the net, but:
1. We lose identity by distri
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I maintain servers with both Hetzner and ThePlanet. I must say that for the money, I am very happy with Hetzner. I simply love their Robot control panel, it has gotten me out of binds a few times. I am actually not the customer, I maintain the server for the customer, but I'm definetely happy with the service.
I have no complaints about ThePlanet, but nothing special about them either.
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You forgot to mention the 149 euro setup fee. Basically you're pre-paying for about 30% of the server and then from that 49 EURO about 20 euro is monthly pay for the server cost and 29 euro is colocation/bandwidth.
Hetzner is OK, no comment here, but you do have to mention the downsides, such as absolutely no erotic content allowed (nudity, art, regular porn - have one person post a NSFW picture on your forum and you may get terminated) and relatively poor speed to some parts of US (I've seen average of 400
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Hetzner is OK, no comment here, but you do have to mention the downsides, such as absolutely no erotic content allowed (nudity, art, regular porn - have one person post a NSFW picture on your forum and you may get terminated) and relatively poor speed to some parts of US (I've seen average of 400 KB/s to Texas)
I did not know that. We run a company website, so this should not be a problem. However, we do run public forums. I wonder how _anyone_ can enforce any rules about posting in a forum. Even if you were to delete offending posts, there is still the time between when it was posted and when it was deleted. If they are policing, I hope they do it with a large grain of salt. This restriction about ordinary porn is very weird though. Is there something in German laws which disallows it?
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How is the company for hosting US based sites latency wise? Looks like ~120 ms pings from Eastern US.
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Not sure. I live in India, so most of the internet has worse latency than that. Germany is closer as long as we don't get routed through Singapore and the Pacific, kinda like touching your nose around your head. :) However, 120ms is not something I'd call bad for ordinary use. We use interactive SSH shells from here, and it feels good. If you are running something time sensitive like stock trading, maybe then you'd need something closer.
This looks pretty straightforward, to me (Score:3)
I'll tell you exactly what's going on, I bet.
This is simple. SoftLayer sells bandwidth to UK2. UK2 sells to the CDN.
Now, SoftLayer charges 5 times what UK2 does for the same bandwidth. UK2 is clearly in the over-sell-the-bandwidth business.
Whoever came up with that business model imagined normal website usage, not a CDN. When they were going through the books last week, they noticed they were bleeding serious (and probably dangerous) amounts of cash to one customer. When they looked at the customer, they said, "Holy shit! They are basically re-selling our service! They are leeches bleeding us dry!"
(normal website usage normally has a peaky usage cycle, CDNs can probably maintain a much flatter line -- and the area under the curve is probably where UK2 pays SoftLayer)
So, SoftLayer says, "Shit! These guys pissed us off and are costing us big time money! Get them off the network! Update the TOS to get right of them and use the we-can-change-it-to-suit-us clause to do it now!"
This is a little bit like your local ISP discovering that you are selling WiFi to all your neighbours for a quarter miles around -- they are going to turf you if you refuse to stop, even if they didn't think to add that as a bad behaviour in their TOS.
(And notice that the NOC poster did say that UK2 said they would take them back if they stopped being a CDN)
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Fine and dandy, but surely they could make some effort to minimize the damage to everyone involved. They were apparently offered more money and refused cold. They COULD have done something like accept enough money to cover the loss and then give a reasonable notice to terminate the account.
Of course they could also stop the sleazy practice of advertising a deal better than they actually intend to provide and hoping all of their customers over-estimate their needs.
Midphase? (Score:2)
I remember that name mentioned the last time one of these stories about fucking over a downstream service provider came up. It was only a few weeks ago too.
If two of these events happening so soon in succession isn't a big enough warning sign for their other customers to start running, then nothing will be.
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Midphase is also part of UK2. And yes, they appear to be "cleaning up" a number of high bandwidth sites lately.
You didn't see this coming? (Score:3)
I read this story and I'm honestly not shocked.
When you see "unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage for $4.99/month" shared hosting providers, do you think you're going to be able to create a file sharing service on their servers, and not be terminated?
In the same token, do you think a dedicated hosting provider who does the same thing with their bandwidth is going to let you do the same thing? Of course not.
I think anybody who is in that industry by now should realize that if you actually try to use all of your oversold bandwidth month over month, they're going to terminate you for it. How many more years is it going to take people to realize the "too good to be true" is just that - too good to be true?
This is a non-story. If you're with SimpleCDN, I would be looking at other providers right now, as they apparently have no clue what they are doing. If they actually had a clue, they would have realized that using over-sold bandwidth would probably get them thrown off the network eventually. They would have invested in backup servers on other networks, and when that gravy train ran out and the plug was pulled, their blog post would be more along the lines of "thanks for the fish".
Looks bad on the face of it but... (Score:2)
If I wanted to run a CDN, I would want multiple providers (not just multiple locations with one provider) in order to insure redundancy in case of business issues like this.
Sure looks crooked, though.
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It was interesting to me. And "a handful of people" is kind of what /. is about. News for Nerds.
And there is, in fact, lots of streaming stuff broken on the web atm.
I was skeptical at first as well, but SimpleCDN really is doing a good thing, taking care of customers by setting them up with competitors for the last 72 hours straight, when their business has for all intents and purposes been totally destroyed.
It is also interesting to think about the fragility introduced to the internet by the rise of the CD
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Best providers (Score:2)
Anybody want to comment on how much better or worse Amazon and Rackspace or others are?
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>Well, Amazon clearly isn't reliable from this incident.
True that.
I was just asking about CPU/network availability for "mainstream" sites, though.
Wilikeaks' providers Bahnhof and Datacell of Sweden and Iceland are probably best for controversial content:
http://www.bahnhof.net/ [bahnhof.net]
http://www.datacell.com/ [datacell.com]
Re:A very important rule in business... (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to work for UK2 out of Chicago and I can confirm their shadyness. They advertise 100TB of transfer but if every server on every rack they have at SL utilized this they would be out of business.
Ask their sales guys to explain how it works, grab some popcorn, and laugh as they fumble their reply or ignore you.
100TB = SHARED bandwidth, as in all servers on a rack or switch share the 100TB. That is their deal with SL, or at least it was a few years ago.
This guy probably caused an overage so they pulled the plug on him.
When I worked there I did the same thing to other accounts for various other reasons. Sorry, but this is not unheard of I'm afraid.
For the record, OP: Hosting Services Inc. *IS* UK2, and they also resell BOTH The Planet and Softlayer's servers. There is only one real Hosting Services DC and I don't think that runs dedicated boxes. In all, UK2 has somewhere around a dozen brands, maybe more by now, that are spread out through these data centers.
Oh and Ditlev is a PR expert, I would not trust anything out of his mouth. Just saying.
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I also used to work for UK2 as a level 1 tech, but after they moved from the Chicago office. I worked on the shared side of things (Midphase, Anhosting, Wingsix and oh ya ... Dotable). The entire company is shady at best. They terminate accounts at will all the time for little reason, and only refund the customer's money if they throw a fit. Their policies are also randomly enforced, one tech/admin my let an abusive client slide while others will nail them to the wall. They see their dedicated server c
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Not Softlayer, 100TB (UK2)