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.'"
Unfortunate (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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: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.
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: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.
Re:After reading that story three times (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 you even have a lawyer on staff to draft contracts and examine the contracts you were signing?
You were a parasite on their network. They terminated you. There's no conspiracy here.
Re:This looks pretty straightforward, to me (Score:1, Interesting)
Sorry, you're wrong, at least one some points. UK2 probably doesn't buy bandwidth from the Planet (though it is possible). When companies host at the Planet, they almost always receive additional services such as tech support and server administration, though they may retain ownership of their servers. UK2 is one of those groups. Chances are they do oversell, as most webhosts do nowadays, but that's probably not the main issue here. My guess is that SimpleCDN is just run by a dumbass with a Slashdot account (See above where users claim SimpleCDN was responsible for submitting the story).
In all likelyhood, the SimpleCDN owner overran his bandwidth limit for the month (it's common practice at the Planet to simply shut down users that overrun their bandwidth, often without notice. Whether this is a good business practice or not is up for debate), and while investigating the incident, people at The Planet found out that SimpleCDN was allowing users to upload copyrighted material to the site. Once they realized that his site just sat around serving up (possibly illegal) files all day, The Planet refused to bring their site back up. The Planet has used similar tactics when dealing with "proxy" sites. In fact, the correspondence posted above was probably just one of dozens of responses the Planet has given him in an ongoing email cockfight, so he probably has more information than he's letting on. There's no chance in hell that this was the only email he's gotten from them, as Planet employees are required to respond to every email they get from a customer.
When the story claims that The Planet is a "hosting giant", what they really mean is that it's a company with under 100 employees attempting to manage technical support for hundgreds of servers. UK2 is probably a bigger company than The Planet, but UK2 is just one of their clients. They can't be bothered to respond to every incident where an end user or reseller gets caught up in a copyright legal battle, so they play it on the safe side and terminate the account to avoid that scenario. Its totally within their rights too, because its probably *already* in their TOS that they can terminate a user on any grounds. If SimpleCDN wants to run their service, then they need to get their own server and fight their own legal battles instead of pulling in an unwitting UK2 and the Planet and expecting safe harbor.
In my opinion, the editors should have never posted this story. It's simply the tale of a dispute between a customer and their webhost over their TOS (which certainly already disallows the hosting of copyrighted material). The title should read "Hosting company disallows CDNs on their network", which would have been cast away by the editors because it wouldn't have surprised anyone. If they were hosted by GoDaddy, people would have given even less of a fuck.
Source - Former Planet employee who probably had root access to their server at one time or another.
Re:A very important rule in business... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 clients (through 100tb, etc) as people who should know enough about what they're doing as to not need any support, so they don't offer basic support to them. Call their support line and pick the option for dedicated support and you'll likely sit on hold for over an hour without a response. If you do get through, it'll be Ahkmed in India who will just tell you in broken English to create a ticket anyway.
UK2 doesn't care about their customers or their employees. If they think a client is costing them money - even if they are within the ToS - they won't think twice about cutting them off. They don't care about working things out, either, hence the ultimatum they gave to SimpleCDN "get off our network or stop being a CDN". Their entire business model is overselling in the hopes that only a small fraction of the users actually use more than 10% of their allotted space.
There's also a huge disconnect between different arms of the company. I can almost guarantee that no two of those communications to SimpleCDN came from the same person, and each of those people communicating with SimpleCDN had a different understanding of what UK2's policies were on the matter.
It's hard to believe UK2 as being described as a hosting giant when you've been on the inside and have seen their operation. If you're thinking about hosting with them or any of their subsidiaries (UK2, Westhost, 100tb, VPS.net, resell.biz, Midphase, Wingsix, Anhosting, Dotable or Autica), just don't. Save yourself the trouble and go with someone that's been in the game longer and has a better track record. All UK2 does is buy up smaller brands to boost their own profits. The clients of those smaller brands just get dropped in the bucket with all the rest and if they don't like it, so be it (take a look at Dotable's forums for example: http://dotable.com/).