SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning
admin.simplecdn.com
admin.simplecdn.com
-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.
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?
Bezos' lack of interest in profit is well-known, e.g. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.... (2006).
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.
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.
Compare the claims on http://vps.net/ to the reality of http://status.vps.net/
Generally, I'm pleased as punch that Slicehost, Linode and Amazon came along, as now I have fair prices with real limits. If I outgrow them, I don't have to move, I just increase memory allocation, or grow the slice, or add a node, whatever.
Dreamhost couldn't get away with this because likely, 80% of their users are paying $9.95 a month for the equivalent of 25 cents worth of usage.
They aren't fine if you want to deploy a web-scale infrastructure on top of them and make tons of money. That much should be obvious to anyone architecting such services.
* 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.
Yes, it's subjective ("doesn't require us to upgrade infra just for you"), but so what? If you want hard numbers, go with the ones which advertise hard limits.
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.
When the barrier to entry for an internet-based business is so low, I expect ISPs and other service providers to understand this requirement, and provide plans and prices accordingly.
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?
>... 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.
1. Competition. If you provide N gigabytes of storage/bandwidth, another provider will offer N * 2, and they instantly look more competitive, even if they aren't even actually capable of providing that. So, back when we provided limited plans, we were constantly being forced to increase our resource promises to unrealistic levels just to avoid looking stingy.
2. Expectations. If you provide N gigabytes of whatever, customers will expect (and demand!) that their site be able to use up all of their provided resources. This is both on a policy level ("what do you mean I saturated the interface?") and on a technical level ("why can't I serve 100 gigabytes of dynamic HTML a month?") This becomes an increasing issue as competition drives the provides up, and the actual resources you're supposed to provide are absurdly high. (Consider for instance 100tb.com, which was mentioned earlier in this thread - good luck actually pushing 300+ MBit constantly.)
In practice, the policy we've got now actually works better in some ways for customers because they don't have to care whether they're exceeding resource limits, either subjective OR objective. So long as they're running a site which complies with our Terms of Service, we'll do our best to keep it going, even if it gets big.
What if one of your customers end up taking you to court for breach of contract, of does your contract explain what you have just pointed out?
Company legal policies are not his domain, so it's probably a waste of effort to complain to him about it.
I see how you figured out he was an employee now, I'll be sure to do profile checks on people in the future to get a better frame of reference.
We had a Dreamhost account (have!), and briefly entertained using them for our rollout, but some simple number crunching and common sense made us see that Amazon was set up for the possibility that we would really have to scale, whereas Dreamhost was pretty much set up for casual work-at-home developers who were looking for absolute rock-bottom costs.
Seems like the simpleCDN guys made the opposite decision, and went with a company that markets XYZ rather than really looking under the hood. It's incumbent on any business to vette their vendors and understand the risks, rather than just point a finger and say "they promised!"
Could you define an "illegitimate use of resources"?
From your TOS, I should be fine so long as the intent of the site wasn't to do either.
For what it's worth, I generally recommend Dreamhost to people looking for small personal sites or new apps -- until they need to move, but it's my experience with DH that eventually they will need to move. As I've experienced on more than one occasion, the limits, ignoring the Unlimited + 50Gb claim, are enforced far more vigorously than you claim.
In any case, I don't understand why the ISP wouldn't choose to send any communication about the termination. Seems like reckless behaviour.
This only goes to show that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't.
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.
* 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hosting plans page though has:
Unmetered Bandwidth (324TB) add $399 / month
Except for the minor inconvenience that they cancel your account when you actually do that.
After reading this I'm doubly glad we moved away from them.
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.
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