Will LU go the OVH way ...?

[solaris]

i just stumbled upon this topic while browsing the dedi section at WHT

quite interesting debate

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=854683

[dwdm]

I was counting the minutes for this thread to appear here...

Is there anything to worry about? It's just a discussion... you are gladly invited.

[FransTormer]

I was counting the minutes for this thread to appear here...

Is there anything to worry about? It's just a discussion... you are gladly invited.

Not really a discussion, is it? The FAQ on you website clearly states that bandwidth is being shared and you have no guarantee on 100Mbit all the time.

That being said; how is your business-model based then since all dedicated servers on your site have 100Mbit and a nice description where/how to use them, like a website and such. I would feel pretty f-worded if I would rent a server at $100/month from you guys, as a total n00b about p2p-networks and just wanna set up a nice website (maybe with a lot of pictures or some streaming vids) only to find out later "yeah, you were on a shared VLAN and your neigbour was torrenting so basically, deal with it".

I do understand the difference between price vs. bandwidth but honestly feel that the topicstarter has got a point; the moment a hosting-provider admits to oversell its network, you might lose more people than just the torrenting peeps, so to speak.

From your FAQ: In other words you share 1 GBIT Uplink with 24 customers which could or could not give you 100 MBIT/s all the time

I read that as: if you're lucky and everybody behaves, you get burst-speeds of 100Mbit but generally you pay for 100Mbit and get 50Mbit at best constantly.

From your server-description: # This is why bandwidth intensive applications such as: Sex sites, Streaming, Large FTP sites, Proxy servers including TOR, P2P, IRC servers, BitTorrent

Does this mean you also have deep-packet inspection in place or look into the servers of your customers to filter out the servers that apply to these criteria?

[dwdm]

You seem to know our network better than we do, congrats on that.

But hey, let me get technical if you don't mind:

Every Switch has 24 ports with 4 non-combo SFP uplinks of 1 GBIT each. These uplinks can be aggregated, put into different VLANs, and so on. So this is what is going to happen technically when a server is getting released:

Customer is being put into the main default VLAN. If we see that a customer is using more than 80% over a few days, he will be moved into the "busy" VLAN that "only" has 1 GBIT Uplink for all our hungry customers. So basically we have 25% of busy customers on one switch and 75% normal customers. Now let's do some math:

25% of 24 ports = 6 ports - let's round it up to 10. If you are very unlucky you will have 15 busy customers in the 1 GBIT limited VLAN.

The P2P n00b customers will not notice anything since they are on a totally different VLAN with slightly more capacity. This will also be the VLAN for customers who want to have 100 MBIT/s guaranteed.

And NO, we don't oversell! We just want to explain heavy users that they have no 100 MBIT/s guarantee although chances are good that they will get them and current seedbox users can probably make a testimony.

[FransTormer]

See, an answer that helps explain things to the normal man on the street. Although I do not pretend to know all about your datacentre, I would like to point out in this case that the FAQ on your site could be easily mistaken (24 users on 1Gbit vs. the odd 10 on 1Gbit which would still make it about 100Mbit per abuser - some overhead).

No doubt there are loads of combo's on VLAN's and so on that you guys have in place to try to alleviate bandwidth-stress for everyone and put the real bad peeps in a seperate corner, but the discussion that was started on WHT and the accompanying FAQ and other "if's & but's" on your site might complicate things. Or just shield yourselves from the n00b-torrenter while the old resellers (any word on that new agreement???) have a good understanding of the server.lu-business and won't cause too much trouble.

Thanks for your answer so far!

[Six66Mike]

I wish I sold seedboxes at 50 euro a piece lol. I do a lot of VPS sales and plan to expand that, offer more webhosting packages etc. Basically 1 stop shop for VPS, Webhosting, VPN & DNS soon, Seedboxes. I plan to be a long term customer, no high turnover and a business model that survives without seedboxes. But of course that's the best business you get these days.

It's not that I don't like the speeds I get on my OVH server, it's all the crap that comes with dealing with them. I took ownership of an existing server on low priority traffic. I shut it down for a day, no change. It went offline due to an outage for days, no change. Their throttling policy & service is what chased most people away and server.lu was the next best thing.

I've been looking for anything similar and so far haven't found it, so if you guys go down the OVH path in dealing with customers etc then I suspect the same thing will happen and some other company will end up with a huge spike in demand until they pull the plug as well. I'm hoping you don't though

[dwdm]

The discussion on WHT has been opened because we recently noticed an increase of seedboxes in our network and that I wanted to understand how others in this business are handling this delicate matter.

It doesn't need packet filtering to find out where the seedbox customers are, it just needs a look at the port stats and some googling like "seedbox server.lu".

Let me make a few things clear:

- we do not encourage seedboxers to come to us

- we have no intentions to force seedboxers to move away, but we want to make it very clear once and for all that they are not paying for 100 MBIT GUARANTEED, but for 100 MBIT UNMETERED. Our definition of UNMETERED is that we give you a port and we don't send you a bill for traffic at the end of the month. This port is provided on a best-effort base and if it turns out that you can sometimes only get 45 MBIT/s you should not shout at us, because it can happen. Clearly, if you get only 10 MBIT/s you have the right to shout because then something is not good!

- we remain open-minded but on the other side we must be cost effective. Bandwidth is not for free. We do a lot via public peerings, but still not everything can be hot potatoed to peerings and then we need to pay Transit, which is 6-10 times more expensive. With that in mind we observe our customer ports without annoying them

- my personal problem is, as you can read on WHT, that seedboxing is a very volatile business. It is not reliable at all. This is not meant in a discriminating way, but you have to admit that you people will not stay very long if your downloads start to become slow of it someone else is making you a better offer to host your dedicated server with them. Webhosting customers are the ones that will probably stay with you forever, because they do not have the same needs as a seedboxer and they build a platform around your servers. Moving such a platform to someone else is not like moving a few torrents to a different server, if you know what I mean.

Just relax... nothing is going to happen. I just want to get a few point of views from both sides.

[Six66Mike]

I don't think I would complain on 45mbit lol, it'd have to be under 20mbit for more than a few hours to get me concerned about it really. As you said, it's not a guaranteed 100mbit and its cheap

I'd consider getting a capped plan around 5TB a month after our MRTG has been running longer. Is there any reason your usage graphs are always way off the actual traffic, is LAN traffic excluded or is there a bug?