4 ms·

Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth, and allocate them to this pu

Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth, and allocate them to this purpose. I see four possibilities: - They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server, in which case the third party is losing money and shouldn't be doing this. - They are paying the third party at least what it costs to rent the server, in which case why aren't they just renting the server themselves? They could probably negotiate a bulk discount. - They are trying to hide this activity from the cloud server provider by involving third parties. While this may not be a ToS violation as such, I'd guess that if they're hiding it, it is something the cloud providers will want to crack down on if it becomes significant. - This entire scheme is actually a plan to get access to countries with weird regulatory requirements, e.g. foreign companies are not usually allowed to own servers in China. This one's pretty legit actually, but it's a really complex version of the scheme. I think at least one of those must be true, and none of them would be a good sign for the future. Edit: I guess "paying the third party less than their costs" and/or "not making a profit themselves" might be what they mean by "Uber-like", so it would just be an elaborate joke?

boh 4y ago
I guess it really is Uber-like.
asciii 4y ago
> Something doesn't add up here. Agreed, I'm mildly annoyed that farba.js repo has not been updated since 2021 (no further info) + grammar issues [1] [1] https://github.com/FarbaCDN/farba-public/blob/master/src/farba.js#L30 https://github.com/FarbaCDN/farba-public/blob/master/src/far...
mranton 4y ago
>Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth: Bare-metal servers are much better is our case. Please note, bandwidth is not free. You can follow the links and see the actual price for it. If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7. >- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server we don't know prices in all datacenters all over the world. That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  > If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7. While that is true in theory, if you in practice saturate your bandwidth 24x7 by reselling it your contract will probably get cancelled (or at least that is the case for most "unlimited" contracts). I don't think you actually answered the questions of the parent.
  - bauruine 4y ago
    That's possible true for the <50$ servers but with 143$ it's sustainable for the provider even if you use it 24/7. Yes 0.0005$ per GB egress and a provider in Europe still makes money.
  - srmarm 4y ago
    There is a difference in this case between 'unlimited' and 'unmetered'. The limit is on the throughput (1Gbps) rather than the total bandwidth which is itself naturally limited by the throughput x time. That being said I could still see this being against TOS if you end up chewing up SSDs, hosting dodgy content or running at full power constantly.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  > That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service. But that breaks the economics of this, no? If you're in the US and charge $6/TB and I'm in Germany and charge $100/TB, why would traffic ever go to my server? If your US server gets overloaded, am I now making $100/TB? How does the network ensure that this is both fair and competitive? Moreover, how can a customer know that they're not going to get a surprise bill for an order of magnitude more than they planned for?
  - solidsnack9000 4y ago
    If someone wants to serve traffic from a peer in Germany, then they will pay you. What they are paying for with a global CDN is ultimately location.
tyingq 4y ago
I think it's indirectly exploiting providers that give you a fixed bandwidth rate for a low cost. Those providers do this knowing some large percentage of customers don't use it all. So, if this becomes popular, flat rate servers with unmetered bandwidth at a fixed speed would become more expensive, or come with a more specific ToS to prohibit that. Similar to how data hoarders ended the "really cheap personal cloud storage" bubble.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I think it's quite simple. The math adds up, they just want third parties to network with them. The more servers join this system, the more their product is worth. At the same time, the cost of managing hundreds or thousands of servers is moved to others. The more this trick will be used, the higher the cost of the dedicated fast internet connections with cloud hosts will become. Most people buying dedicated, unlimited uplinks don't upload the amounts mentioned in this article, which is why bandwidth is relatively affordable. If everyone buys into this network to make a profit, the prices would probably rise to the point that profit drops. This isn't against any kind of ToS I know of. The "make 2.4x your investment" promise also assumes your server will actually serve 100TB of content. The more people join, the fewer files your server will serve and the less profit you'll make. In the end, the system is profitable until the network has reached the size where everyone breaks even. If people leave the network, profits go up again, if people join the network, profits drop and people back out. People renting servers game the system trying to one-up each other and in return Farba gets a worldwide CDN for cheap. The best trick may perhaps be that server providers may directly buy into the system, as they can get bandwidth and servers for lower margins than their customers. This gets Farba high-quality service for cheap while the service providers add a relatively easy income stream on the side. All of this comes at an additional cost to the customers, because now your battery-starved mobile phone is validating cryptographic signatures of images and other content. This also leaves legal questions: who's responsible for illegal content hosted on servers hooked into this network? If your hosting provider of choice gets a takedown notice for child porn or malware, will you still be able to use their services?
- mranton 4y ago
  Thank you, @jeroenhd, you got it right. >now your battery-starved mobile phone is validating cryptographic signatures with a native app, it costs nothing. Actually, the main power consumer is the phone screen. >who's responsible for illegal content hosted on servers this is a very important question. We are going to run AI models against all content we host on Peers. Right now, we don't accept third-parties and "fake" all Peers ourself. Want to ask lawyers what is the best way to handle this case.
thayne 4y ago
For the first bullet point, it could be worth it for the third party if they are using the server for something else, but have surplus resources that could be used for this CDN. And they might be paying higher rates initially to get enough peers to make the CDN worth using.

boh 4y ago

I guess it really is Uber-like.

asciii 4y ago

> Something doesn't add up here. Agreed, I'm mildly annoyed that farba.js repo has not been updated since 2021 (no further info) + grammar issues [1] [1] https://github.com/FarbaCDN/farba-public/blob/master/src/farba.js#L30 https://github.com/FarbaCDN/farba-public/blob/master/src/far...

mranton 4y ago

>Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth: Bare-metal servers are much better is our case. Please note, bandwidth is not free. You can follow the links and see the actual price for it. If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7. >- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server we don't know prices in all datacenters all over the world. That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service.

SahAssar 4y ago
> If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7. While that is true in theory, if you in practice saturate your bandwidth 24x7 by reselling it your contract will probably get cancelled (or at least that is the case for most "unlimited" contracts). I don't think you actually answered the questions of the parent.
- bauruine 4y ago
  That's possible true for the <50$ servers but with 143$ it's sustainable for the provider even if you use it 24/7. Yes 0.0005$ per GB egress and a provider in Europe still makes money.
- srmarm 4y ago
  There is a difference in this case between 'unlimited' and 'unmetered'. The limit is on the throughput (1Gbps) rather than the total bandwidth which is itself naturally limited by the throughput x time. That being said I could still see this being against TOS if you end up chewing up SSDs, hosting dodgy content or running at full power constantly.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service. But that breaks the economics of this, no? If you're in the US and charge $6/TB and I'm in Germany and charge $100/TB, why would traffic ever go to my server? If your US server gets overloaded, am I now making $100/TB? How does the network ensure that this is both fair and competitive? Moreover, how can a customer know that they're not going to get a surprise bill for an order of magnitude more than they planned for?
- solidsnack9000 4y ago
  If someone wants to serve traffic from a peer in Germany, then they will pay you. What they are paying for with a global CDN is ultimately location.

tyingq 4y ago

I think it's indirectly exploiting providers that give you a fixed bandwidth rate for a low cost. Those providers do this knowing some large percentage of customers don't use it all. So, if this becomes popular, flat rate servers with unmetered bandwidth at a fixed speed would become more expensive, or come with a more specific ToS to prohibit that. Similar to how data hoarders ended the "really cheap personal cloud storage" bubble.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I think it's quite simple. The math adds up, they just want third parties to network with them. The more servers join this system, the more their product is worth. At the same time, the cost of managing hundreds or thousands of servers is moved to others. The more this trick will be used, the higher the cost of the dedicated fast internet connections with cloud hosts will become. Most people buying dedicated, unlimited uplinks don't upload the amounts mentioned in this article, which is why bandwidth is relatively affordable. If everyone buys into this network to make a profit, the prices would probably rise to the point that profit drops. This isn't against any kind of ToS I know of. The "make 2.4x your investment" promise also assumes your server will actually serve 100TB of content. The more people join, the fewer files your server will serve and the less profit you'll make. In the end, the system is profitable until the network has reached the size where everyone breaks even. If people leave the network, profits go up again, if people join the network, profits drop and people back out. People renting servers game the system trying to one-up each other and in return Farba gets a worldwide CDN for cheap. The best trick may perhaps be that server providers may directly buy into the system, as they can get bandwidth and servers for lower margins than their customers. This gets Farba high-quality service for cheap while the service providers add a relatively easy income stream on the side. All of this comes at an additional cost to the customers, because now your battery-starved mobile phone is validating cryptographic signatures of images and other content. This also leaves legal questions: who's responsible for illegal content hosted on servers hooked into this network? If your hosting provider of choice gets a takedown notice for child porn or malware, will you still be able to use their services?

mranton 4y ago
Thank you, @jeroenhd, you got it right. >now your battery-starved mobile phone is validating cryptographic signatures with a native app, it costs nothing. Actually, the main power consumer is the phone screen. >who's responsible for illegal content hosted on servers this is a very important question. We are going to run AI models against all content we host on Peers. Right now, we don't accept third-parties and "fake" all Peers ourself. Want to ask lawyers what is the best way to handle this case.

thayne 4y ago

For the first bullet point, it could be worth it for the third party if they are using the server for something else, but have surplus resources that could be used for this CDN. And they might be paying higher rates initially to get enough peers to make the CDN worth using.