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

http://admin.simplecdn.com/

by archon810 • 16 years ago

125 86 16 years ago

admin.simplecdn.com

moe5• 16 years ago

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.

bmelton3• 16 years ago

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.

carl_3• 16 years ago

Dreamhost however is very open about the type of `best effort, use what you like` model.

Compare the claims on http://vps.net/ to the reality of http://status.vps.net/

JoachimSchipper2• 16 years ago

Personally, I think pay-for-use models a la Tarsnap and NearlyFreeSpeech.net are quite fair. I suppose most people will be put off by "mental transaction costs", though.

andfarm6• 16 years ago

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.

lwhi• 16 years ago

If that's the case, maybe both parties are at fault. Claiming availability of 'unlimited bandwidth' is just as naive as believing in it.

In any case, I don't understand why the ISP wouldn't choose to send any communication about the termination. Seems like reckless behaviour.

amock• 16 years ago

They make you pay extra for an unmetered gigabit port, so it seems reasonable that you should be able to use more than the standard bandwidth allocation if you pay for more and if you don't you should be able to use the standard package.

JoachimSchipper2• 16 years ago

Presumably because they could sell bandwidth below market price? This would also explain why they aren't scrambling to put up alternate data centers, but instead sending their customers over to MaxCDN.

bobds• 16 years ago

It's ok if you want to stop providing service to SimpleCDN, but at least give people some notice, don't just start shutting down their servers.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Lots of companies have single points of failure like this, probably more of them than those that don't.

This only goes to show that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't.

cheald• 16 years ago

If you're going to sell "unlimited" bandwidth, you'd damned well be ready to deliver it. It's arguably very naive of SimpleCDN to build a business on an "unlimited" provider (there's no free lunch, after all), but selling services as "unlimited (unless we decide you're actually using what we sold you, in which case we're going to kick you off)" is not cool.

davidu• 16 years ago

Unlimited bandwidth is easy to provide. Just rate-limit the port once they exceed a certain amount of bits transferred. They still have unlimited bandwidth, but at 128kbps instead of 128000kbps.

treo• 16 years ago

That is what strato does, it drops the 100mbit to 10 mbit until you unlock it, and this game goes on every 300gb (it starts at 1tb).

acangiano• 16 years ago

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.

citricsquid5• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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?

felixge• 16 years ago

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 < 1 MB/sec

* 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.

carl_3• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

moe5• 16 years ago

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.

shub• 16 years ago

The way I see it is, if UK2 wants to fuck customers out of the service that UK2 advertised and the customers paid for, the customers are welcome to fuck right back.

robryan• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

moe5• 16 years ago

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.

foobarbazetc• 16 years ago

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

carl_3• 16 years ago

UK2 claims its SL forcing the disconnect.

meroliph• 16 years ago

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.

mbreese• 16 years ago

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

tybris3• 16 years ago

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.

mdaniel• 16 years ago

Does mastercard.com process payments? I got the impression that it was just the marketing/corporate presence that was affected.

tybris3• 16 years ago

Securecode was affected as well, which is the payment portal you need to go through for many on-line shops.

jonknee2• 16 years ago

"... 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.

citricsquid5• 16 years ago

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

brown9-2• 16 years ago

"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?

tybris3• 16 years ago

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).

loganlinn• 16 years ago

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.

wildmXranat• 16 years ago

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.

dedward4• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

dedward4• 16 years ago

That's odd - every datacenter (read: colocation facility) I've worked with had clear pricing for rack space, power, bandwidth, etc -I could use as much as I wanted, and I knew what I'd pay for it, and would re-negotiate if the regular usage was going to go higher.

By DC's - do you mean some kind of web-hosting provider instead?

Even the VM providers I use all have soft & hard limits on traffic stated clearly - in practice, anyone offering "unlimited" anything is automatically excluded from any kind of critical business hosting decision - because that's not realistic or maintainable.

joshfraser2• 16 years ago

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.

joshfraser2• 16 years ago

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

moe5• 16 years ago

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?

tptacek3• 16 years ago

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.

nphase• 16 years ago

I was wondering the ame thing. If I were to start youtube on 100tb, would I be blacklisted too?

xd4• 16 years ago

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.

sadiq• 16 years ago

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

jjoe• 16 years ago

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

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

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