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Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses

Posted by Soulskill on from the capitalism-never-gets-old dept.

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.'"

6 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. After reading that story three times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:After reading that story three times by Sundo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:After reading that story three times by Compaqt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
      I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
  2. Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:A very important rule in business... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Actually by Tanktalus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?