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mailto:abuse@softlayer.com Be sure to include relevant details that establish it's coming from the SoftLayer network. It will be followed up on.

The host is explicitly identified as http://www.softlayer.com/ in the takedown request.

Trouble is, unless you are paying rather more for hosting than the market rate, or deliberately purchasing capacity in some high-ping(relative to most of your readers) country outside the reach of the US, I suspect that your business just isn't worth enough to risk any significant legal exposure, and quite possibly not even enough to pay for a legal consultation before just obeying the takedown.

A friend of mine brought this to my attention since I have recently been in a similar situation. I've resolved my situation by using fuse+pogoplugfs (available from Pogoplug) with 1TB of online storage for ~$60/mo. The downside is that though the storage problem has been solved, the you would be using your allocated bandwidth to your server which could get spendy on overages. I've looked at other options such as Amazon S3 which is very robust and I believe it even offers object "versioning". My hosting provider, Softlayer also has a Cloud Object Storage solution that looks like a good contender (more info). Anyways, these are solutions I've reviewed and thought I would share them in brief with you.

http://www.softlayer.com/ - their base dedicated servers for $159/month come with 3000GB/month of bandwidth, exactly what you need. They've been around forever and a ton of other VPS people basically just resell their stuff anyway.

1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.

2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)

3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .

You must be new here, let me welcome you to "The Internet". I hope you enjoy your visit.

Hosting companies don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about such matters, so long as the people responsible for the hosting pay good money.

Even the hosting companies that claim to be anti-spam, and who's acceptable use policies state that ANY support of spam, including hosting spamvertized web sites, when confronted with multiple, on-going violations, will ignore all reports, remove all forum posts calling attention to those posts, and continue to cash the checks from the spammers.

You must be new here, let me welcome you to "The Internet". I hope you enjoy your visit.

Hosting companies don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about such matters, so long as the people responsible for the hosting pay good money.

Even the hosting companies that claim to be anti-spam, and who's acceptable use policies state that ANY support of spam, including hosting spamvertized web sites, when confronted with multiple, on-going violations, will ignore all reports, remove all forum posts calling attention to those posts, and continue to cash the checks from the spammers.

You must be new here, let me welcome you to "The Internet". I hope you enjoy your visit.

Hosting companies don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about such matters, so long as the people responsible for the hosting pay good money.

Even the hosting companies that claim to be anti-spam, and who's acceptable use policies state that ANY support of spam, including hosting spamvertized web sites, when confronted with multiple, on-going violations, will ignore all reports, remove all forum posts calling attention to those posts, and continue to cash the checks from the spammers.

Softlayer has multi-core boxes starting at $150/month; we've got a box with them with a 15k RPM SCSI drive for about $300/mo.

For dinky personal projects, I've got a dedicated Athlon XP 2400+ with half a gig of ram with a little no-name provider -- and it only runs me $50/mo.

I've seen all sorts of prices in the $50 - $300 range for varying hardware. If you're willing to gamble on a lesser known host, you can get hardware cheap.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend running an established webapp with thousands of active users in a datacenter like this, but when you're at the "garage" stage, they're more than sufficient. They're certainly preferable to shared hosting on a grade-A provider, from what I've seen.

They're great aside from their total lack of any sort of decent support... A reload shouldn't take a week and a half, a KVM setup because they fucked the reload up shouldn't take 4 days. They should be monitoring tickets much more actively, I've sent in a reboot ticket with them once that took 3 hours. Basically, they're a bunch of incompetents. I moved all of my stuff over to http://www.softlayer.com/ which has a much better support system, much friendlier staff, and much better infrastructure in general. It's pricier, but hey, you get what you pay for.

Some months back, the TWiT Podcast Network went down. Leo Laporte hosted the RSS feeds at The Planet (where the story's poster was working when he quit/got threatened). Leo was angry at The Planet's lack of response and feedback. Someone informed him that at some point in time, The Planet started to go downhill as a company for various reasons so a bunch of their employees got together, quit, then went off to form their own hosting company, Softlayer. A number of other employees followed as well. Leo took this advice and relocated the hosting to Softlayer.

I wonder if the missing part to the submitter's story is that he quit The Planet to move to Softlayer and so The Planet's management, mad that yet another employee was leaving for that company, threatened to sue him. It would jive with the theory that this was a warning to other employees. It will ultimately fail but in the meantime it works as a band-aid for the leakage of employees to the other company.