Any reasonable person realizes the difference between a business and consumer service. 10/100/1000 tb.com is obviously a 'consumer' service. Reselling it (and screwing with their business model in the process) is pretty obviously going to get you terminated at some point.

This is no different than cellular phone service, or buy 1 get 1 free (limit 5 per customer) at the local grocery store.

No, they ($cellcompany, Grocery store, 100tb.com) can't actually afford for each customer to use their full capacity all the time, but on average, all customers can use as much as they want/need while still maintaining quality service. This is no different than dialup+modem pools back in the day.

simplecdn was trying to use a consumer level service as a business service to reap the cost benefits, which is why they were not able to get a business level contract. Thus, they were being parasitic.

I work in the managed hosting industry (including some CDN services), we have our own cages, with our own racks, with our own servers, our own routers, and our own connections to various providers in geographically diverse locations. We have our own ASNs, and IP address space.

What *exactly* was your product? What *exactly* does your company even own? It sounds like you were just reselling the equivalent of a poorly constructed reverse squid proxy cluster. You had no binding contracts with your provider? Do you even have a lawyer on staff to draft contracts and examine the contracts you were signing?

You were a parasite on their network. They terminated you. There's no conspiracy here.

By 'high traffic' I mean sites pushing in excess of 100gbit/s. The sites could function fine with 2x Dell PER710 (Quad-core Xeon E5520 2.266GHz 16.00GB RAM 6x SAS 147gb PERC6/i), but we require redundancy and failover capacity.

I work with some very high traffic sites, storing large data sets (100GB+).

  Depending on the application (if it allows for different write-only/read-only database configurations) we'll have a master-master replication setup, then a number of slaves hanging off each MySQL master. In front of all of this is haproxy* which performs TCP load balancing between all slaves, and all masters. Slaves that fall behind the master are automatically removed from the pool to ensure that clients receive current data.

  This provides:
  * Redundancy
  * Scaling
  * Automatic failover

  The whole NoSQL movement is as bad as the XML movement. I'm sure it's a great idea in some cases, but otherwise it's a solution looking for a problem.

(*) http://haproxy.1wt.eu/

While some shoddy CDN companies may reroute you at the DNS level, many are actually smarter about it. Smart systems will redirect you to a 'closer' system via a different URL for media files, or utilize anycast BGP routing so that you always take the shortest path to one of their nodes.

As for 'who serves stuff on CDNs that I want to see anyway' -- everyone. From porn sites to Google to Youtube, they're all one type or another of CDN.

You're absolutely correct. I work for a hosting company (though our typical customer is in the gbit/s range), all I can say about $150/TB is that it's the kind of thinking that lead to the OP losing his data and having no backups.

Even our shitbox bottom of the barrel machines (top of the line a couple years ago) we blow out at $99/mo w/ 10mbit come with a 4 disk RAID5 array, typically using Adaptec or LSI (real LSI, not 3ware) controllers. That alone is $400+, add 4x disks, cost of spares in inventory, etc and you begin to understand why *good* hosting costs more -- that's only the disk subsystem!

.. is a Solaris system (for XFS) and rsync. After each rsync a snapshot is created, for 45 days of retention (each snapshot is fairly small for us, your data sets may vary). It's extremely fast and not difficult at all to figure out, just make sure you turn off all the unneeded Solaris services (essentially everything but ssh).

I'd love to be doing this with Linux but btfs is not yet stable enough for a production environment.

I do *not* recommend trying to use hard links for incremental backups, you'll find that unless your files are large (instead of numerous) that most of your processing time is spend expiring old snapshots.

I think this is what you're looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

Toshiba isn't the only company working on this either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation

Spammers know how to process javascript too. The benefits of having Google index the page as a client would see it far outweighs someones belief that they were 'safe' from spammers.

Also, here's a small sample config for serving a particular pool on a particular interface (which would be the vlan "interface" on the Cisco), easily found on Google:

class "vlan1234"
{
                match if
                (
                                (binary-to-ascii(16, 8, ".", option agent.remote-id) = "0.15.63.ab.52.16") # This is the MAC of the switch
                                and
                                (binary-to-ascii (10,8, ".", option agent.circuit-id) = "0.0.0.47") # This is the interface number
                );
}

pool {
                range 192.168.100.5 192.168.100.254;
                max-lease-time 300;

                option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
                option routers 192.168.100.1;
                allow members of "vlan1234";
}

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cisco+dhcp+relay&l=1

You can easily run hundreds of thousands of hosts off a single DHCP server. It is not cpu intensive particularly if you have a decent lease duration.

After the first paragraph I said, "This is what the DMCA is for".

I work for a large provider, we host a number of inflammatory sites. We obviously are not in a position to verify anyones claims, nor do we usually have direct access to remove the content in question to begin with. This is precisely one of the things the DMCA was made for (as bad as it may be, it works well for this). We receive a complaint that anyone can fill out, we give our customer the legally required time to respond. If they choose not to respond with a counter complaint they must take down the offending content. If they do respond, the content stays up. After that we are only required to act upon a legal decision.

| The only way that could work is if Google have mapped the physical location of every WiFi network and are using them to do the locating. I knew that was theoretically possible, but I didn't know Google had actually done it. For some reason, I found that slightly creepy.

Actually, Google didn't do it. This company did: http://www.loki.com/

It's pretty interesting and useful. Personally I don't have an issue with a public company doing anything a government can do without you noticing, it brings those things into the light where people can say 'hey, if $company can track my cell phone/laptop via wifi access points, so can the government'. I personally think Google worked *very* hard to ensure that privacy concerns would be avoided with Latitude. When you start Google Maps it mentions latitude, your icon changes significantly, exiting Google Maps asks if you wish to continue sharing your location. You must enable sharing on a per-friend basis when adding them, and the default is NO (even on the selection box). It's also possible to share at different levels of accuracy, AND to set a location to be reported in case you don't want anyone to know you're "hiding".

If $ISP cannot profitably sell $x mbit/s at $y dollars/month they need to either increase $y or decrease $x. It doesn't cost anyone more to deliver traffic from the BBC than anywhere else (peering ratios/contracts aside). It sounds like the problem is that average people are ... *gasp* ... actually using their internet connection for more than e-mail and web surfing and the bandwidth:customer ratios are no longer extremely in the ISPs favor.

ISPs should instead be looking at ways they can reduce their costs while providing better service to their customers, such as a peering arrangements with the likes of YouTube, BBC, etc. or a local appliance that serves up the most bandwidth expensive content (you know, like any content delivery network does).