5 ms·

The information is spotty but from what I gather it seems someone (SimpleCDN) took the "unlimited bandwidth" claims on 100tb.com a little bit too literally - an

by moe 16y ago

The information is spotty but from what I gather it seems someone (SimpleCDN) took the "unlimited bandwidth" claims on 100tb.com a little bit too literally - and tried to build a business around them. 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.

jacquesm 16y ago
Lots of companies have single points of failure like this, probably more of them than those that don't. This only goes to show that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't.
bmelton 16y ago
I hope that's the case, honestly, and I hope that it does go to court. I'm frankly sick and tired of the 'unlimited' advertising model, wherein unlimited really means limited to some arbitrary amount that is not disclosed. 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.
- carl_ 16y ago
  Dreamhost however is very open about the type of `best effort, use what you like` model. Compare the claims on http://vps.net/ http://vps.net/ to the reality of http://status.vps.net/ http://status.vps.net/
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    FYI status.vps.net doesn't include most outages they deem "too small" and only affect ~5% of customers. They only post there when it affects a large number.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Personally, I think pay-for-use models a la Tarsnap and NearlyFreeSpeech.net are quite fair. I suppose most people will be put off by "mental transaction costs", though.
  - bmelton 16y ago
    That might be a part of it, but I think the other part of it is that the average guy looking to start a blog, or website, or whatever, has absolutely no idea how much traffic his thing will generate. For people like that, the claims that Dreamhost makes are a godsend, as he doesn't have to worry about "what if I get a 1000 subscribers?" 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.
    - dedward 16y ago
      They are fine for joe average who wants to play around and start a blog. 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.
- andfarm 16y ago
  We (at DreamHost) don't state any explicit limits as they're pretty fluid in practice. The effective limits are basically: * 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.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    What you're describing is exactly the problem. I don't want to worry about whether or not I'm exceeding some subjective limit, I want a hard number limit that I can compare to my actual usage.
    - anonymous246 16y ago
      Hmmm, I think the dreamhost guy gave a pretty good explanation. Thanks for that. But he seems to be getting downmodded (downmod if he's wrong; not if you disagree). 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.
      - xd 16y ago
        Maybe it's just how I see it, but "unlimited" is a "hard limit". If you don't provide unlimited service, then say so, it's not rocket science.
    - dedward 16y ago
      What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want. 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.
lwhi 16y ago
If that's the case, maybe both parties are at fault. Claiming availability of 'unlimited bandwidth' is just as naive as believing in it. In any case, I don't understand why the ISP wouldn't choose to send any communication about the termination. Seems like reckless behaviour.
- amock 16y ago
  They make you pay extra for an unmetered gigabit port, so it seems reasonable that you should be able to use more than the standard bandwidth allocation if you pay for more and if you don't you should be able to use the standard package.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Presumably because they could sell bandwidth below market price? This would also explain why they aren't scrambling to put up alternate data centers, but instead sending their customers over to MaxCDN.
bobds 16y ago
It's ok if you want to stop providing service to SimpleCDN, but at least give people some notice, don't just start shutting down their servers.
cheald 16y ago
If you're going to sell "unlimited" bandwidth, you'd damned well be ready to deliver it. It's arguably very naive of SimpleCDN to build a business on an "unlimited" provider (there's no free lunch, after all), but selling services as "unlimited (unless we decide you're actually using what we sold you, in which case we're going to kick you off)" is not cool.
davidu 16y ago
Unlimited bandwidth is easy to provide. Just rate-limit the port once they exceed a certain amount of bits transferred. They still have unlimited bandwidth, but at 128kbps instead of 128000kbps.
- treo 16y ago
  That is what strato does, it drops the 100mbit to 10 mbit until you unlock it, and this game goes on every 300gb (it starts at 1tb).

by moe 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

Lots of companies have single points of failure like this, probably more of them than those that don't. This only goes to show that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't.

bmelton 16y ago

I hope that's the case, honestly, and I hope that it does go to court. I'm frankly sick and tired of the 'unlimited' advertising model, wherein unlimited really means limited to some arbitrary amount that is not disclosed. 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.

carl_ 16y ago
Dreamhost however is very open about the type of `best effort, use what you like` model. Compare the claims on http://vps.net/ http://vps.net/ to the reality of http://status.vps.net/ http://status.vps.net/
- citricsquid 16y ago
  FYI status.vps.net doesn't include most outages they deem "too small" and only affect ~5% of customers. They only post there when it affects a large number.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Personally, I think pay-for-use models a la Tarsnap and NearlyFreeSpeech.net are quite fair. I suppose most people will be put off by "mental transaction costs", though.
- bmelton 16y ago
  That might be a part of it, but I think the other part of it is that the average guy looking to start a blog, or website, or whatever, has absolutely no idea how much traffic his thing will generate. For people like that, the claims that Dreamhost makes are a godsend, as he doesn't have to worry about "what if I get a 1000 subscribers?" 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.
  - dedward 16y ago
    They are fine for joe average who wants to play around and start a blog. 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.
andfarm 16y ago
We (at DreamHost) don't state any explicit limits as they're pretty fluid in practice. The effective limits are basically: * 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.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  What you're describing is exactly the problem. I don't want to worry about whether or not I'm exceeding some subjective limit, I want a hard number limit that I can compare to my actual usage.
  - anonymous246 16y ago
    Hmmm, I think the dreamhost guy gave a pretty good explanation. Thanks for that. But he seems to be getting downmodded (downmod if he's wrong; not if you disagree). 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.
    - xd 16y ago
      Maybe it's just how I see it, but "unlimited" is a "hard limit". If you don't provide unlimited service, then say so, it's not rocket science.
  - dedward 16y ago
    What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want. 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.

lwhi 16y ago

If that's the case, maybe both parties are at fault. Claiming availability of 'unlimited bandwidth' is just as naive as believing in it. In any case, I don't understand why the ISP wouldn't choose to send any communication about the termination. Seems like reckless behaviour.

amock 16y ago
They make you pay extra for an unmetered gigabit port, so it seems reasonable that you should be able to use more than the standard bandwidth allocation if you pay for more and if you don't you should be able to use the standard package.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago

Presumably because they could sell bandwidth below market price? This would also explain why they aren't scrambling to put up alternate data centers, but instead sending their customers over to MaxCDN.

bobds 16y ago

It's ok if you want to stop providing service to SimpleCDN, but at least give people some notice, don't just start shutting down their servers.

cheald 16y ago

If you're going to sell "unlimited" bandwidth, you'd damned well be ready to deliver it. It's arguably very naive of SimpleCDN to build a business on an "unlimited" provider (there's no free lunch, after all), but selling services as "unlimited (unless we decide you're actually using what we sold you, in which case we're going to kick you off)" is not cool.

davidu 16y ago

Unlimited bandwidth is easy to provide. Just rate-limit the port once they exceed a certain amount of bits transferred. They still have unlimited bandwidth, but at 128kbps instead of 128000kbps.

treo 16y ago
That is what strato does, it drops the 100mbit to 10 mbit until you unlock it, and this game goes on every 300gb (it starts at 1tb).