Abuse handling isn’t free, there are providers who charge per report. I’m sure BitMitigate wasn’t paying Voxility sufficiently to deal with all the attention they chose to attract.
If you pay enough you’ll have SLAs and your host will be contractually obligated to not cut you off for hosting 8chan.
>The only relationship was free was users -> 8chan website, and 8chan did do it for free..
I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you on about? I get the feeling you don’t even understand the entities involved here.
The only part of hosting controversial content for free was the user -> 8chan relationship, which they very explicitly did for free.
Everything else was not, and if money was the problem, I don't think sudden and arbitrary cutoff was the natural result. (marking up the price seems to me the reasonable response, which would have naturally gone up the chain, perhaps to the point of 8chan charging its users [or heavier advertising]).
But this wasn't a business decision, so obviously it wouldn't be a business outcome.
Handling inquiries costs money, BitMitigate was generating lots of them. If BitMitigate had been paying enough, Voxility would be contractually obligated to keep them up.
I can’t imagine why the relationship between 8chan and its users would matter at all in this conversation.
>I can’t imagine why the relationship between 8chan and its users would matter at all in this conversation.
I was responding to "Hosting controversial content poses significant operational costs, nobody will do it for free"; no one in the story was hosting controversial content for free, except for 8chan, which was doing exactly that (at no cost to the users posting it).
Other than that relationship, I don't see anyone in this tale that would expect free hosting for controversial content.
>If BitMitigate had been paying enough, Voxility would be contractually obligated to keep them up.
Right; my point is that if this was a normal event, Voxility would have simply increased fees to match the increased costs of hosting. BitMitigate would then increase its fees, and so on. Thats just the dynamics of business.
Suddenly dropping service, and publicly promising to block all content (and I suppose reading between the lines, not rehosting even if BitMitigate ponied up), is hardly the natural monetarily-driven reaction to such an event. The SLA would have prevented this from happening suddenly... but I find it hard to not see this as a fairly unique and directed response... perhaps to a nonunique problem (was Voxility called out when Daily Stormer moved? Was it even really called out in this instance, beyond the tweet referenced in the article?)
>I don't see anyone in this tale that would expect free hosting for controversial content.
BitMitigate was presumably paying Voxility for normal hosting, not for the bulletproof hosting BM was marketing. Those are two quite different services.
It appears that BM may have expected free bulletproof hosting from Voxility. (Or maybe not, perhaps they expected to get kicked out)
If I pay you to wash my car that doesn’t mean I’m paying you to clean my house.
>Right; my point is that if this was a normal event, Voxility would have simply increased fees to match the increased costs of hosting.
Bullshit. They’d have terminated the relationship because the customer was not being upfront with them.
Besides, going “hey pay us more or you’re going offline” has a real bad vibe to it, I doubt many sane companies would want to do that.
This is completely standard practice in the hosting industry. I’ve been kicked out of tens of datacenters (including Voxility!), I know exactly how this works.
If you pay enough you’ll have SLAs and your host will be contractually obligated to not cut you off for hosting 8chan.
>The only relationship was free was users -> 8chan website, and 8chan did do it for free..
I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you on about? I get the feeling you don’t even understand the entities involved here.