

SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning - archon810
http://admin.simplecdn.com/

======
tybris
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.com/input/?i=AMZN+vs+GS+vs+GOOG>

Boycott? Pfff. I predict record revenues.

~~~
jonknee
"... making Amazon one of the few on-line shops that could still process
payments" is a huge overstatement. Mastercard.com and Visa.com being down has
no material effect on almost all eCommerce (I don't remember the last time I
had visited either). PayPal does, but that affects Amazon as well since they
accept PayPal at places like Zappos and Diapers.com.

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

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

~~~
citricsquid
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.

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

------
moe
The information is spotty but from what I gather it seems someone (SimpleCDN)
took the "unlimited bandwidth" claims on 100tb.com a little bit too literally
- and tried to build a business around them.

The question remains why a supposed infrastructure company thought it'd be a
good idea to rely on a single other company to provide their...
infrastructure.

~~~
bmelton
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 'unlimited'.

I know that Dreamhost oversells on purpose, and that's fine, but I think they
can still do that (though perhaps not quite as effectively) by just stating
their upper limit. Of course, this means that more people are likely to hit or
approach that upper limit, but at least they'll know when they need to grow
into another 'slice' as it were, or whether or not to relocate from Dreamhost
altogether.

~~~
andfarm
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, but we won't install new hardware just for you.

And, of course, you're also required to stay within the ToS, which exclude
most of the really obvious ways of burning through lots of resources. (Public
upload / mirror sites aren't permitted, pirated media is obviously a no-go,
and you aren't allowed to use your "unlimited" disk space for content that
isn't part of your site.) We've got some $10/month customers who are using
insane amounts of resources; so long as they don't expand beyond what we can
handle without building new infrastructure just for them, we're happy to keep
them on.

~~~
cmelbye
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.

~~~
dedward
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 internet isn't free. The more your
business is worth, the more you should be spending on solid contracts,
multiple sourcing and fault tolerance.

~~~
Groxx
> _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_?

~~~
andfarm
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.

~~~
Groxx
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.

~~~
andfarm
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. :)

~~~
Groxx
> _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_.

------
acangiano
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.

~~~
citricsquid
Seriously, as much as their team "care" their product is absolute shit. My
experience with vps.net has put me off UK2 for life, some of the things I've
seen in the customer forum are just plain scary. Like the admission they don't
have the infrastructure to handle DDoS attacks because it's "too expensive".

~~~
archon810
Wow, really? I've been pondering whether I should get off linode and try out
vps.net due to the elastic scaling they have (burstable memory, etc), but
damn, they're this bad?

~~~
citricsquid
I was with them for 1 year, September 2009 - September 2010 and I've now moved
to Linode. I would highly recommend you stay away from them. The longest I
went without downtime was 90 days, in total I've had well over 40 hours of
downtime within 1 year, I've never had that much elsewhere even on dedicated
hardware that isn't as "redundant" as they claim to be.

Their product is amazing _if_ you don't care for stability and then it beats
the competition hands down, but if stability and uptime matter to you at all
stay away. If vps.net had the stability and reliability of Linode they'd rule
the world.

Sign up for a daily node ($1) and then login to the customer forum, you'll see
so many reports of problems and this is _after_ they recently "revamped" the
forum and removed over a years worth of posts. I can't provide links because
they removed my access.

------
joshfraser
From 100TB's TOS (presumably just added):

We will not provide services to those that are using our services for:

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is prohibited
from running on our network. Special requests to run CDN services may be
approved on a case by case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will
result in the disabling of all hosting services.

<http://www.100tb.com/tos.php>

~~~
moe
That's a hilarious tactic.

Are they now going to blacklist bandwidth intensive business models one by one
until only blogs and "under construction" pages are left on their "high
bandwidth" plans?

~~~
tptacek
It's amusing in context, but it's not an absurd contract term. Hosting a CDN
on an "unlimited" hosting provider is basically bandwidth arbitrage. It makes
total sense that the hosting provider would want to limit their hosting to
bona fide hosting customers.

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

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

~~~
moe
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.

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

------
wildmXranat
I was a client of both Softlayer and 100TB/UK2 whatever you want to call them.
Both instances were separate occasions and my experience with Softlayer was
nothing but spotless.

I had 2TB monthly bandwidth allotted, and the server was using up close to 80%
of that. We were hosting 4 TF2 game servers, forums etc. Their customer
service and services provided were top notch.

100TB on the other hand was not as pleasant. Even though we ended up not going
with them in the long run, I have to say that the process of signing-up,
managing the servers and canceling was ok. Nothing great. The factor that
pushed us to another carrier was network speeds. There were moments when we
were getting 10% of what we were paying for and that wasn't a fluctuation
worth the risk.

------
carl_
It's all a little bit silly.

Everyone knows 100TB can't afford you to use the included bandwidth.

When you start actually using your bandwidth then you cut into their profits
and they'll want to get rid of you.

When you start actually using the bandwidth _and_ undercut their own CDN using
their _resold_ infrastructure, then they're losing out twice.

It's important to remember that UK2 = OnApp/UK2/Midphase/VPS.NET/100TB/Hosting
Services Inc/etc/etc. UK2 doesn't own much infrastructure, they're just a
reseller and overseller.

~~~
dhughes
It's just like insurance, you are required to have it but when you need it and
have to use it the insurance company jacks up the price from that point on.

~~~
moe
It's a little bit worse than that. Most insurances will at least pay up and
_then_ jack up the price. 100tb.com is not paying up (as in: providing
service), instead they canceled the contract, apparently on short notice.

------
dedward
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 severability. If your business depends on your providers, you
make sure your providers know what business you are in and make sure the
contracts are solid.

~~~
timdorr
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 system, so it is one place they end up losing
out big time.

What they should have done is partnered directly with a network provider. I
was looking over at the MaxCDN offer they linked to on the page and they
appear to have partnered with Mzima. That's a smart move (Mzima's an awesome
network; akin to Internap, but a lot cheaper). Maybe if SimpleCDN recovers
from all of this, they'll start approaching things differently and stop trying
to put stress on a business relationship where it hurts the most.

~~~
joshfraser
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.

------
robryan
_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._

Hosting plans page though has:

 _Unmetered Bandwidth (324TB) add $399 / month_

~~~
chrismiller
100TB a month = ~300mbps of constant use. The Unmetered upgrade means that you
could saturate the full 1gbps for the entire month.

~~~
moe
_means that you could saturate the full 1gbps for the entire month._

Except for the minor inconvenience that they cancel your account when you
actually do that.

------
mbreese
It's quite refreshing to see them provide a migration path for their
customers, even if it is to another company.

------
xd
My company had a server hosted with UK2. We bailed when they had no answer to
why our server restarted randomly and made absolutely no attempt to look into
the problem. The lack of respect from them, that our company depended on a
reliable server, just astounded me.

After reading this I'm doubly glad we moved away from them.

------
foobarbazetc
Not really seeing why they're "naming" SoftLayer here, when it's 100TB.com
they're dealing with.

~~~
carl_
UK2 claims its SL forcing the disconnect.

~~~
meroliph
Since UK2 doesn't really have a CDN product themselves, as they resell
HighWinds and Level3, their interest is a bit lower as opposed to SoftLayer
which has million dollar contracts signed with InterNAP for connectivity and
DC space, which also sells content delivery.

My guess is it's not really about kicking out the competition but mostly the
fact that they can't realistically offer the said bandwidth for the advertised
price, which is far too low for a quality network blend.

~~~
to
you do know they host youporn and other huge streaming services? youporn host
around 800 machines with them and i would guess use a lot of bw. softlayer is
not a small hoster, theyre big.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It's not a question of capability, it's a question of profitability.

------
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

------
sadiq
The WebhostingTalk thread makes interesting reading:
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1005111>

------
loganlinn
SimpleCDN has provided fairly consistent service until now. Their customer
service was always non-existant, but they were exceptionally cheap. We were
forced to switch yesterday when SimpleCDN went down -- I actually wasn't aware
what happened until I saw this.

