Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It's unfortunate to see obviously overselling hosts not even try and make right by their sales pitch. However, those "to good to be true" deals really are "to good to be true". You get what you pay for. Best of luck to the SimpleCDN team and their future endeavors.
How is this about advertising? Our entire service is down. We are helping our customers move to other CDN providers.
We are out of business here, and are doing right by our customers moving them to our competitors. We're not selling anything or taking orders.
This is about something much larger - infrastructure providers terminating services with no notice and no reason.
It could happen to anyone for any reason. You thought your dedicated server was safe - but think again.
You ignorant tool, have you ever submitted a story to Slashdot? If you had, you'd know that they don't hit the front page right away. Sometimes it's hours later, many times it's days. If you do post a story, it's not like you sit there, wait a few minutes, and then start replying to people, because you may very well be sitting there for days.
I'm guessing that "BlueToast," whoever that is, even if it is a sockpuppet, as you so flagrantly accuse him/her of being, likely posted this in the middle of the day or early evening. It hit the front page at 5:11am US Eastern/2:11am US Pacific time. Given that the story is about a U.S. provider, I'm guessing BlueToast is probably sound asleep right now, and SimpleCDNNOC's claim that he/she is up in the middle of the night working for his/her customers not only plausible, but probable.
By the way, on what are you basing your accusation of "flagrant over-use of bandwidth?" Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers? Do you have the metrics showing how much bandwidth they're using, and how much is/was available?
Slashdot is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Let's see... News? Yes, I think this is pretty damn newsworthy. For nerds? Well, it's squarely in the IT/technical realm, so yeah, I think that it would be of interest to nerds. Stuff? It's definitely stuff. That matters? Well, if you're one of SimpleCDN's thousands of customers, or someone who consumes those customer's content or data, or if the submitter is right in that this activity may spread to other hosting providers (which it sounds like it may), then that would be a big green checkmark in that column as well.
I could just as easily accuse you of being a sockpuppet for one of the nasty evil companies that is screwing SimpleCDN, posting on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward to try to add insult to the injury you've already caused, and my accusation will be just as valid and appropriate as your little rant.
I guess that's just a long way of saying Anonymous Coward - if you think this story isn't worth reading, then don't comment. If you can't do that. STFU. Now get off our grass!
Except they don't. Because it's impossible.
Bandwidth isn't something you can just oversell without consequence; if you have a massive overage from people actually using what they are paying for then you are probably out of business.
See, I think what happened here is that 100tb had a massive overage and found out that SimpleCDN was one of their big players and they are frantically trying to get the big guys off their bandwidth pool so that they can hedge against the overage while already having SimpleCDN's money. This would fit into my projections for the original business model of 10tb.com before they became 100tb. At least with 10tb there was some sign of it being at least somewhat realistic; with 100tb there is no way.
Or... let's think of it this way:
Say you buy a server from 100TB for $201.95/mo (baseline server with 100TB bandwidth). This works out to being ~303mbps 95% on a typical burst pattern (and likely much higher for streaming traffic!). The server probably costs $100/mo just to run, leaving $101.95 for bandwidth (in this example we're not making any profit mind you!).
This means that your ~303mbps 95% breaks down to $0.33/mbps.
Not even BANDCON can hit that price point and they go really, really low.
This business model does not make sense to me. There is very high risk and I see no way that they can hedge against overages if everyone actually opens up and uses all of their 100tb allotment. Maybe they are paying by GB instead of mbps but that makes no sense because then SoftLayer would be holding the bill and frankly I don't think they are that stupid.
So no, it's not possible to make up profit through volume on this when you keep in mind the risk you are hedging. It's just too much of a gamble for any sane business operator to even consider.
Sorry, that's your problem.
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.
Thank you, Mr. Genius. Did you know that Slashdot uses hosting services, so technically, it's at the mercy of its provider. They should know this. So if their provider suddenly decides to take down their servers, hey, that's Slashdot's problem, right? I run some gaming web sites, with Linode as my hosting provider. If Linode suddenly decides to shut down my servers without warning, I suppose that would be my own damn fault, right?
Okay, so let's take this to its logical conclusion. That means that really, when you think about it, the only people who should be trusted as hosting providers are the massive telecoms, right? Because they're the only ones who can really guarantee that no upstream provider will shut down your service, since they own the wires that go to your house.
That's a brilliant solution, consolidate all service in the hands of one or two companies. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
Oh wait, AT&T depends on its wire suppliers, which depends on miners in Chile, who depend on wheat growers in Russia... Looks like we need to just consolidate the whole damn world into the hands of AT&T and let them rule us as dictators...
Which is why Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard all terminated their dealings with WikiLeaks, right?
They weren't presented with any kind of court order telling them to do so, so obviously they chose to do it on their own.