Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses

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.'"

Comments

After reading that story three times

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have absolutely no frigging idea what it's about.

Re:After reading that story three times

[Sundo]

If you think little more broadly, you'll soon come to realize there are very few entities in this world that could be counted as "real providers" as you seem to mean it. Almost whatever you (as in person, company or otherwise), you're always depending on someone else to provide you the infrastructure to allow you to do it. Very few "real providers" provide the food for their employees, commuting infrastructure for getting to work, or - if you want something closer to average IT business - electricity.

Practically all of us will always be at mercy of someone offering us the infrastructure to do what we are doing, and western societies (well, most societies) are built on such infrastructure deals. If we can't be reasonably sure we'll be getting the infrastructure service we have paid for and have reason to expect, this society will soon start looking lot different than it does at the moment. This being IT business is no excuse for the expectations suddenly be lot lower.

Re:After reading that story three times

[Anonymous Coward]

and our customers will back that up.

Not after this, probably.

You need multiple geograpically-dispersed dedicated data centres, multiple
backhauls, redundancy all the way through - the whole nine yards. You need
to hold the SLA's to the network providers yourselves, or you can't control
what is happening - in short, with dedicated servers, you have no control
whatsoever over what happens once the packet leaves your ethernet card.

You're trying to deliver a service that requires a multi-million dollar
investment to get it done right, on the cheap. And you've failed. Well no
shit Sherlock!

Sorry, but you are a bunch of amateurs - that's all there is to it.

Re:After reading that story three times

[rtfa-troll]

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.

On the internet, everybody is at the mercy of their suppliers. Even the tier1s. The largest ISPs are all below 10% traffic. That's why Google has invested so heavily in networking and why net nutrality is such a hot topic. If everybody else cut you off at the same time you would be dead. It's clear, however, that they should have had at least three cloud suppliers. I'm guessing that SimpleCDN was simply too new to have got that properly set up (we all take big risks at the start of a business; there's no other way).

Re:After reading that story three times

[Compaqt]

You were good till you called them a parasite on the network.

Are customers obligated to pay money all the while fearing to actually use what the parties agreed on?

There is something missing here

[alfredos]

No sane company terminates "right the hell now" a paying customer, even if it is unprofitable. Unprofitable customers usually are shown the bill or the door hoping to either convert them to profitable customers, or to take their business elsewhere without causing too much fuss. My gut feeling agrees with the AC that over-use of bandwidth may be the case. However, sane business practice demands to try and straighten the situation before starting using the scissors. I don't see any of that in the only side of the story commented thus far - unsurprisingly, since TFA comes from that one side.

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't use SimpleCDN because they're gone.
I can't use Amazon's CDN because they're jerks to wikileaks.
I can't use VPS.net's (UK2/100TB) CDN because they're jerks to SimpleCDN.
I can't use anyone who runs Softlayer's CDN because they're in kahoots with UK2.
I can't use anyone who runs Layer3 because they gave in to Comcast (netflix story from a while back) and will probably jack up my prices.
I can't use Akamai because I don't have deep pockets.
If Google comes up with a CDN I can't use them because they steal everyone's privacy.

...at this rate I'm hoping I don't really need a CDN.

Re:A very important rule in business...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for UK2 out of Chicago and I can confirm their shadyness. They advertise 100TB of transfer but if every server on every rack they have at SL utilized this they would be out of business.

Ask their sales guys to explain how it works, grab some popcorn, and laugh as they fumble their reply or ignore you.

100TB = SHARED bandwidth, as in all servers on a rack or switch share the 100TB. That is their deal with SL, or at least it was a few years ago.

This guy probably caused an overage so they pulled the plug on him.

When I worked there I did the same thing to other accounts for various other reasons. Sorry, but this is not unheard of I'm afraid.

For the record, OP: Hosting Services Inc. *IS* UK2, and they also resell BOTH The Planet and Softlayer's servers. There is only one real Hosting Services DC and I don't think that runs dedicated boxes. In all, UK2 has somewhere around a dozen brands, maybe more by now, that are spread out through these data centers.

Oh and Ditlev is a PR expert, I would not trust anything out of his mouth. Just saying.

Re:Actually

[Tanktalus]

Why does it matter what they're going to use their paid-for internet to watch? Would it have been any better for GP to say "for their pr0n addiction"? Or "to download the latest leaks from wikileaks"? Or "to download security fixes for their Ubuntu systems"? Really, this could be a text-book case of "They came for the X, but I'm not an X, so I said nothing." And you're not merely doing nothing, you're cheering them on because you're not an X?

Re:After reading you comment three times

[Thundersnatch]

Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers?

Well that is clearly the problem. SimpleCDN had no such contract, other than un-negotiated, one-sided, "we can change this at any time" terms of service you get with cheap-ass hosting accounts.

Honestly, that's no way to run a business. Even if you had a fuckton of redundancy, and used three separate cheap-ass hosting providers for each of your POPs, you're still running a huge amount of risk having no contract with your primary suppliers, especially when they merge with each other and shoot your redundancy all to hell.

SimpleCDN was basically an arbitrage operation, reselling under-priced bandwidth. They started a game of musical chairs, and they lost, just like the options traders who were long on GM's stock or mortgage-backed securities a few years ago.