But there are all kinds of ways to achieve your quota including various forms of arbitrage.

I read today via the MaxCDN blog that SimpleCDN service is in deep trouble – some of their suppliers have apparently pulled the rug from under their feet leaving them with an inability to supply bandwidth to their clients because they no longer have servers to do it.

Note:  I have a sponsorship deal of this blog with MaxCDN and am one of their affiliates, but I really only worry about the affiliate program for large clients with direct referrals – if you have a large site that has high bandwidth demand or needs acceleration, drop me an email via my contact form and I can help you evaluate whether they would be a good partner.
If you check the blog post I think they have a good deal for former SimpleCDN customers or those that just need some continuity until they can recover – I hope SimpleCDN make a little money from people using the coupon code “simplecdn”

The CDN Dog Fight

SimpleCDN have apparently been using infrastructure provided by SoftLayer and Hosting Services, Inc.

That to me sounds like their 10TB and 100TB offerings.

Who in their right mind would offer 100TB of bandwidth with a single dedicated server and not expect it to be used in some way to serve media in large quantity?
They also have unmetered… of course who is going to buy unmetered unless they intend to really use the bandwidth.

Part of the 100TB terms of service state

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is prohibited from running on our network. Special requests to run CDN services may be approved on a case by case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will result in the disabling of all hosting services.

I don’t know whether they had special permission, or how long that term has been in force.

If someone was going to rely on a hosting partner for a huge amount of bandwidth it seems to me they would check the terms of service, and make any special arrangements.

But Hosting Services Inc also run VPS.net and their own CDN services. Until recently they were Akamai partners until Akamai decided to pull the rug from under their feet, and in a quick shuffle they switched to using Level3.

• This sounds to me like SimpleCDN had a deal
• Hosting Services Inc had had enough of SimpleCDN undercutting them on CDN services using their own hosting plans and decided to terminate them at very short notice, in much the same way they themselves were terminated by Akamai. The value proposition SimpleCDN vs Akamai compared to SimpleCDN vs Level3 is significantly different, such that SimpleCDN are without doubt more of a direct competitor of VPS.net than they were previously.
• That sucks, hense MaxCDN’s offer and me being annoyed and writing something when I should be working

I haven’t had a chance to contact Hosting Services Inc or Softlayer for comment, I am meant to be working on other stuff so just need to get the news out in the hope that it helps a few friends recover from downtime before Christmas.

For whatever reason you don’t kill people’s hosting just before Christmas in this way

Some Twitter Chatter

@SimpleCDN Heard about your predicament. I'm working at MaxCDN and we may be able to help. Call me at 818-284-9829. Cheers, Samir Said (CSO)

December 11, 2010 5:48 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@sbbsam

Samir Said

Latest updates on SoftLayer illegal actions: http://admin.simplecdn.com/

December 11, 2010 5:59 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

Our engineering team can help you get up and running on CloudFront right away, and we've so far heard great things about MaxCDN.

December 11, 2010 6:00 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@QuickWebHosting Us too, but in our case they illegally terminated our services. Hope that didn't happen to you too.

December 11, 2010 6:03 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We apologize, and are working on alternative service - and we can help you move to another provider in anyway possible...

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We'll post any additional updates on our feed, and via this site http://admin.simplecdn.com/ regarding SoftLayer illegal actions.

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@EastOfAnywhere Right now we don't know for sure - SoftLayer's actions are unprecedented and are doing all we can as fast as we can.

December 11, 2010 6:28 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@TVMeuBrasil We are doing everything we can - at this point UK2 & SoftLayer are sticking to their goal of illegally forcing SimpleCDN down.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@cloudharmony SoftLayer and UK2 / Hosting Services terminated our infrastructure (hundreds of servers) with no notice and no reason.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast This was an effort by both UK2 and SoftLayer to remove SimpleCDN from the market.

December 11, 2010 7:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker We feel WikiLeaks pain - we pay these guys THOUSANDS, but still they terminate us for no reason with no notice. SoftLayer is bad bad

December 11, 2010 7:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@jprovo They did cut SimpleCDN off without a valid reason and no notice. Sure we'll go to court, but that doesn't really help our custms now

December 11, 2010 7:25 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

SoftLayer is not responding to any of our customers or complaints at this point - please keep contacting them, but they may hang up on you.

December 11, 2010 7:27 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Obviously we have a lot to share about this - but you know how it is; waiting for the lawyer okay first, etc.

December 11, 2010 7:52 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Our goal is to minimize impact to customers, even if we have to move them to other providers. Thanks MaxCDN for helping out!!!

December 11, 2010 7:53 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@hareemca Many customers lost everything, as our pricing and feature set is / was second to none.

December 11, 2010 7:54 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker As soon as we can release more details we will- but the actions were definitely directed specifically at SimpleCDN - yes we pay bill

December 11, 2010 9:15 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SoftLayer A lot of businesses rely on SimpleCDN, at least give customers time to find a new provider before cutting them off so soon.

December 11, 2010 11:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Y3com

Y3.com

@eluis Believe me, we understand. We are happy that MaxCDN is offering our customers a discount - but yes our offering is / was the lowest.

December 12, 2010 1:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SimpleCDN do you guys have backup of the files? Freakin out here... have 750 customers relying on SimpleCDN + no backup! who do I contact?

December 11, 2010 10:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@leebensondotcom

Lee

VPS.NET Twitter Statement

This is interesting – when questioned, the VPS.NET MD knows nothing about it

interesting goings on the CDN market. first @akamai pull the rug on @vpsnet, now uk2 pull the rug on @simplecdn: http://bit.ly/hVtxFH

December 11, 2010 4:00 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

with uk2 & @vpsnet effectively being the same company, i wonder if the two incidents are related? thankfully we moved content away long ago.

December 11, 2010 4:09 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

@sidepodcast As the M.D. of VPS.NET - I knew nothing of this...so I can assure you it's not related to VPS.NET at all. ^NN

December 11, 2010 4:29 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@vpsnet

VPS.NET

I have also checked cache dates on the 100TB terms of service and have a screenshot from 8th December which contained that clause.

I have had interactions with Ditlev from VPS.net and he always seemed like an honest guy who works hard to satisfy his customers.
However… the prime benefactor of SimpleCDN.com being killed off as a competitor to a UK2 service would be the CDN services within the UK2 group… which are run by VPS.net

Cloudflare is a distributed DNS, website security, & distributed Nginx powered reverse proxy (for static content) & caching proxy with content delivery network with some additional tracking and reporting ability.

That is a whole load of technology but what this means to you is:-

On average, a website on CloudFlare …
… loads 30% faster
… uses 60% less bandwidth
… has 65% fewer requests
… is way more secure
All for free!

This is how your website is normally exposed on the web.

You are in direct line of fire for everything that can possibly be thrown at it.

With Cloudshare you have an intelligent doorman in the way, only allowing through certain requests. Some high volume menial tasks such as answering the door to the postman and deliveries of groceries get handled by the caching proxy/cdn – unlike a normal CDN the URL for any file doesn’t have to change so it is very much like you set up a reverse proxy with Nginx or Squid yourself and assigned the traffic to a media server.

Simple Setup

The basic setup is fairly straight forward and only requires changing your nameservers. It is only as complicated as your initial setup, so if you have a little bit more going on… Google Apps, domain keys etc, though it looks more complicated those actually get bypassed.

There are also some extended settings

I haven’t explored these too much, but there are some things to be careful about with a blog. As an example some services such as feed readers often pull images directly and thus might be blocked by any hot linking prevention.

There are some interesting options for identifying geolocation and content obfuscation from certain types of visitors, though that doesn’t mean they are designed for cloaking content from search engines.

This is also where you assign security level with the recommendation being to use high security. You could look on the security as being a little similar to Bad Behavior, though with a CAPTCHA. I wonder if they have thought of monetizing the CAPTCHAs?

Security

The threat control is pretty interesting in that it can block web spammers, botnet zombies and exploit attackers of various types, and that is just with the free version.
The team has a lot of pedigree in this area as they were behind Project Honeypot. With the CAPTCHA and I believe also a message facility, there is also a very effective safety net in case of false positives which do happen, though some bots won’t fill in CAPTCHAs is caught by mistake such as Googlebot. I noticed today some discussion about Google’s sitemap crawler being blocked, and some suggestion of lower crawl by Google resulting from this.

In many ways Cloudflare could be looked on as an extension or next generation Project Honeypot, with the additional bribe of actually providing active protection and a huge bribe by caching content.

Analytics

The analytics features look quite interesting as an aggregate view.

They mention why the numbers might seem so much higher than javascript stats though don’t mention browsers pre-fetching content which is fairly standard these days.

Cloudflare seem to (or claim to) have knocked a second off my load time, though from what I have read that is based on the load time of the home page from another server in various locations.
Overall performance and relative performance will depend on what other optimization you are using.

I am currently using:-

W3 Total Cache Enhanced static page cache to disk
W3 Total Cache Database Cache using APC
W3 Total Cache Object Cache using APC
Autoptimize for combining/minification of CSS/jscript
Header & Footer – I discovered this gets added after Autoptimize has done it’s thing, so useful for adding things that I don’t necessarily want cached such as tracking stuff I am testing.
Cloudflare effectively as my only CDN (though I have a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 and a few other alternatives)

I could possibly improve performance a bit by locally caching lots of javascript, combining/minifying and then having it loaded from the CDN, but there is a lot of bug checking.

I don’t use APC for page caching as I found, at least on my Liquid Web Storm On Demand server that that was a lot slower for time to first byte.

Advanced Setup

You will initially hit problems with IP referrals and your server logs – the ideal solution is to to install “mod_cloudflare” on your server.

There is also this alternative (one of 2) for dealing with just the referrer within WordPress, but this won’t fix your server logs.
You would add this to wp-config.php

if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) )
{
$X_FORWARDED_FOR=explode(",", $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']);
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=trim($X_FORWARDED_FOR[0]); //take the first element in the array
}

Security For Premium Content

This isn’t a secure solution for paid membership sites – you might be better using a real CDN which can either domain lock or generate one time links.

I haven’t actually tried it with video yet.

Mindblowing for e-Commerce

If you are using an e-Commerce platform such as Volusion or BigCommerce which charges you a fortune for bandwidth, but you have control of your Nameservers and DNS this is the most amazing product / solution you will ever find.

Ideally you would go for the pro version with better security and performance which for most e-Commerce stores would likely be just $20/month. The savings for many store owners would be $80+ per month.
Then without messing around with remote hosted image hosting you can have CDN performance and a massive reduction in bandwidth excess fees.

This isn’t the only reason people face extra fees on services such as Volusion and BigCommerce, but it is a major one, and the extra performance and killing the bots makes it a best in class solution.

For further reading I came across this great post comparing the performance of various technology blogs earlier while doing some testing.
TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it’s both.

p.s. I get to use Cloudflare for free, but everyone can – no barter deals for links & currently they don’t have an affiliate program.

Note: This is beta – there seems to be soe problems with some bots currently – most notably Googlebot seems to be having a few problems with this service and my crawl rate dropped by 90% and time to index a page more than doubled – I have currently switched back to my normal nameservers, and a conventional CDN

Dear Rackspace

I am actually a fan of your new Cloud Servers service. There are some huge benefits in using your service that as both a marketing geek and affiliate I can highlight and potentially drive you a lot of business.

However today you have just introduced a payola scheme that will make every one of my clean affiliate links look like a paid link, thus I am going to have to nofollow every single link I give you, forever.

You want me to use badges like this, and in exchange will give me “Goodies” of an unspecified nature.

Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting

The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme.

Here is what they said in an email sent to customers

Our New “Link-To-Us” Program
We’re also launching a new “Link-To-Us” program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/links

Thanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.

The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.

The Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program

As far as I am aware, the Rackspace Cloud affiliate program is effectively “customers only”, as in you have to actually create an account, but you don’t have to necessarily spend anything on their various cloud services.

That being said they have a decent Cloudfiles storage product, and their CDN is reasonably priced, offers incredible low latency, and has a strong API.

The Cloud Servers product is new, the API is still in beta, and on first glance looks to actually be more expensive than using the Slicehost sister service, but if you are looking to create a highly scalable platform, there are significant advantages.

The Mosso Cloudsites service is also highly regarded, though you have to be careful on processor cycles – for an affiliate the referral payout on Cloudsites is much more attractive, just a shame it isn’t monthly recurring.

Problems With Rackspace Cloud Referral Program

Have You Heard About The Rackspace Cloud Referral Program?

Here is how it works:
If someone you refer to Cloud Sites hosts with us for at least 31 days (past their first billing cycle), we will either credit your account $100 or cut you a check for the same (if you want the check, just sign some tax information and that’s it). For all Cloud Files and Cloud Servers referrals there is a $10 referral commission.
There is no need to register before participating, simply have any referral use the primary email address on your account as the ‘referral code’ during the sign-up process online. To give you credit, they MUST enter your email address when signing up. Questions? Don’t hesitate to give us a call anytime. 1-877-934-0409.

One of the big problems is the referral code – you have to encourage people to enter your primary email address as a coupon code.

The obvious workaround is to create a new primary email address for your Rackspace account (and display it as an image)

It would be so much easier if you could define your own coupons

The next problem is incentive – why would someone use my Rackspace referral code?

Rackspace do not currently offer their own incentive to use a coupon, so it would be down to an affiliate to offer something of significant perceived value as an added incentive.

I have something planned for that, that will only be available to people who sign up for a Rackspace Cloud account using my email as a Rackspace coupon. (note: they are still using the mosso.com domain)

I currently have no idea how to make delivery of bonuses scalable, as there doesn’t seem to be a reporting interface for affiliates in the current control panel – maybe they have a dedicated affiliate panel as well, under their original Rackspace affiliate program.

Added Friction

Rackspace might think that not running a formal affiliate system, and just using email addresses somehow removed friction from the referral process, but in many ways it adds friction for serious affiliates.

80% of new customers will be referred by only the top 20% of affiliates, it might even be 90/10 or 95/5

Not Suitable For PPC

There is no way to effectively track this affiliate program offering

• no subids
• no deep linking
• no way to export data (that I can see)
• no thought to integration marketing

Disclosure

This Rackspace marketing campaign seems totally unworkable, especially the direction disclosure is taking.

I am sure Robert Scoble will love the idea of his employers shilling for links.

Izea & PayPerPost have more transparency and better disclosure than Rackspace in this new marketing campaign.
That being said, I always wonder what benefits large blogs have when they frequently have followed links to their hosting providers. Sure they like the service, but that can’t possibly be the full monty.

This guide or checklist is for product owners to think about. Very few of the points raised are a deal-breaker.

Deal Breakers

• Junk products
• Don’t fit my primary target audience
• Poor treatment of customers e.g.
  • Support tickets unanswered
  • Major product issues not addressed in a timely manner
  • Heavily moderated forum – only “happy bunny” threads
• Poor treatment of affiliates e.g.
  • Lack of or late payment
  • Sneaky changes in payment options bypassing affiliates
  • Change of affiliate system without notification
  • Radical change in deal structure
• Generally dishonest sales pages
• Skimming Sales

Major Issues

• Tracking problems
• Disappearing accounting data with no explanation – if I made a sale, and then it is refunded, I need a record of it all. I need the numbers to add up
• I really need SubID tracking to be able to use PPC
• I love the ability to deep link to content
• Upsell Hell
• Viral Hell – (see previous post)
• Major Sales Page leaks
• Excessive promotion of 3rd party affiliate products in launch materials – if your free ebook is crammed full of affiliate links that I don’t receive a benefit from, it is effectively the same as if I was sending my traffic to a PPC review landing page using someone else’s affiliate links.
• Promoting 3rd party offers on a mailing list built with my traffic rather than focusing on the intended launch product during the launch period.
• Excessive promotion of 3rd party offers in general
• Teaching some methods I don’t agree with
• Promoting products I wouldn’t promote due to major issues/deal-breakers
• Integration marketing – sounds nice in theory, in practice if your added value is a load of free offers from your cronies, that I don’t get a piece of the action on, there is a problem.
• No way to export SubID data
• No way to export, or be pushed sales data
• Elements of Proof – proof used on the sales page that is possibly factually accurate, but misrepresented
  • AWStats for traffic measurement?
  • Your Clickbank / Paypal sales didn’t mention PPC costs, affiliate payouts, established list just from previous product launches in the niche etc.
  • The testimonials are from direct business partners
  • When you tested your sales page for conversion, was it with a very warm house list of buyers? Thought so…

Significant Issues

• Payment period – if I am paying for traffic, I want to be paid by you before I have to pay my traffic costs.
• Checks (Cheques) – especially if low value – I can still sorely remember receiving my first cheque from Linkshare, for something like $2.73, that my bank wanted me to pay a $20 fee to cash, and I would receive the money in 6 weeks. I have a better bank now, but offer alternatives.
• Paypal – whilst I hate the transaction charges, especially currency, in many ways it is easier for accounting
• No IBAN support – Having to qualify by receiving a number of checks is just adding friction. If an affiliate knows about the benefit of receiving funds directly, they are going to make this worth while. (I am not sure if there are international banking regulations forcing a few checks to establish identity)
• Private tracking systems – I appreciate the advantages of using Infusionsoft for a publisher with a refined sales funnel, but why do I have to have a separate login and accounting panel for every single program?
• Customer/2nd Tier/Opt-in For Life That Changes – often caused by changes in affiliate tracking system. Suddenly the residual you were expecting dries up, and you had been ramping up on PPC
• Pushed Data or API – I want to be able to offer incentives automatically with all affiliate offers that allow it (where there is a transaction), and I don’t want customers to have to wait for it. I know there are solutions by offering the bonus directly on the thank you page, but in some ways that is a little clumsy.

The following might be looked on by many as “par for the course” of big launches

Stealing Sales

Imagine I sent you 100 opt-ins for your product, but you didn’t get any sales. A few weeks later you offer exactly the same product as a bonus if the prospective customer buys an affiliate product.

• It could be looked on that I didn’t do a good enough job in preselling or boosting my offer with bonuses, thus it is your right to enhance your offer of another product with the original product as a bonus and take all the cash.
• Alternatively I sent you a great prospect who is now a buyer, yet made nothing from my efforts – the lack of initial sales could have been your own value proposition, sales letter, etc, things out of my control.

This is something that is really hard to prove, because there is so much split-testing and list segmentation going on – I might have seen you make the offer only because I am on your buyers list, and that the prospects were sent something else

Solutions?

• Have products that you only ever offer as upsells or bonuses
• Extremely complex cooperative tracking

Many respectable marketers do the first option, and have tons of loyal affiliates possibly because of it.
The second option I might eventually have a solution for, it has been a constant gnawing problem in my head for 4 years.

Servers and Launch Material Delivery

This I can break down into 2 phases

• Primary server stability – I don’t care how much unexpected traffic a launch caused, you should have been able to handle it if you really have the high quality support team in the background.
• Video delivery – You have no idea how bad Brightcove video delivery is from Europe, and also Ustream recorded sessions. They don’t support the ability to buffer a whole video. Amazon is a little better, certainly from the UK, but in Poland half the time I have to open a browser and go and make a coffee.

Note: Amazon also isn’t an ideal solution for premium membership content – I haven’t seen an Amazon implementation yet that didn’t reveal the download location in the Http headers, though it is possible to secure more effectively, probably requiring an EC2 instance to feed unique expiring links.

Reciprocity, Karma & Great Stuff

There are tons of counter arguments – amazing free value can win against almost any issue. There are a few more I could add, but let me know your “pet peeves” in the comments.

Watch out for another post tomorrow, I won’t be pulling any punches