fluidinfo

I signed up for a dedicated server from Serverpronto in late 2006. At $30/month for a real Linux box the price seemed great. I recommended them to a friend who also signed up.

On July 29, 2007 we noticed that both our machines had been hacked into. We’re both very security conscious and we didn’t know how this had happened. Both machines had been broken into in the same way, from the same IP address, leaving behind the same evidence. It was pretty clearly a root kit.

I immediately contacted Serverpronto and asked for help. They offered to do a full system restore for $69 and were otherwise completely passive. I suggested that they might want to take a bit more interest as perhaps their other clients had also been hacked. After a couple of mails I got an email saying that they would make their best effort. But it was too late and I replied asking them to cancel service.

From terry Mon Jul 30 02:32:59 +0200 2007
Message-ID: <18093.12731.650708.403211@terry-jones-computer.local>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:32:59 +0200
From: Terry Jones <terry@XXX.es>
To: "SP1443" <support@serverpronto.com>
Subject: Re: [WYL-89853]: Machines broken into?
In-Reply-To: Your message at 18:34:08 on Sunday, 29 July 2007
References: <jlypcw.k87@serverpronto.infolink.com>

Thanks, but no. I would simply like to cancel service. What more
do I need to do?

Terry

====== Please reply above this line ======
Machines broken into?

Mr. Jones. I will transfer to the abuse team, and the Customer
Service your issue.

We will find the best solution.

They replied:

From support@serverpronto.com  Tue Jul 31 00:00:10 2007
Message-ID: <jlzkyj.p6l@serverpronto.infolink.com>
From: "SP1422" <upport@serverpronto.com>
Subject: [WYL-89853]: Machines broken into?
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 07 05:56:43 -0400
To: terry@jon.es

Machines broken into?

69.60.109.173 has been taken offline.
ServerPronto Support

Ticket Details
=========
Ticket ID: WYL-89853
Tracking URL: https://serverpronto.infolink.com/esupport/index.php?_a=tickets&_m=viewmain&emailre=terry@jon.es&ticketkeyre=dee55eec&_i=WYL-89853
Department: Technical Support
Created On: 29 Jul 2007 07:57 AM
Last Update: 29 Jul 2007 05:34 PM
Status: Closed

That’s it, right? End of story.

Unfortunately not. First of all, my friend could not get Serverpronto to stop billing after he also canceled his contract. They just kept billing. After many phone calls and emails, they eventually had to get rid of Serverpronto via getting the credit card company to refuse all charges.

I thought I had gotten off their books. But I got a phone call from Deutsche Bank a couple of months ago telling me that a company called Serverpronto was trying repeatedly to charge my now-expired credit card. I was completely surprised and told them that I had nothing to do with Serverpronto and that I had canceled service with them. I had been receiving mail from Serverpronto telling me that my credit card expiry date was coming up. I mailed them to tell them there was a mistake and that I was no longer a customer, and they promised to look into it.

And now, today, I get a statement from my bank showing that they have approved two charges for a total of $356.30 from Serverpronto!!!! That means those evil assholes have somehow called Deutsche Bank and managed to charge me for a whole year of costs on an account that was closed, for a server that was not up, and on a credit card that had expired.

I am assured by my friend that I will never see a cent of that money again.

Deutsche Bank are about to hear from me.

DON’T USE SERVERPRONTO.

Go search Google for things like Serverpronto billing cancel ripoff. You’ll get tons of hits. I should have done more homework before I signed up. They actually had good support. But the people running the billing department deserve a slow painful death. This is obviously a deliberate policy designed to extract the maximum out of their trying-to-depart customers.

To whom do I complain?

Today Amazon slashed the price on storage in SimpleDB from $1.50 per Gb per month to just $0.25 per Gb per month.

Note that you can buy a 1TB hard drive these days for $75. That’s 7.5 cents per Gb for as long as the drive lasts. So Amazon were charging 200 times the price of retail hard disk storage per month. Yes, the AWS storage is replicated, and you don’t need a data center or employees, but a 200X markup (per month) seemed a bit excessive. Until last night, that $1.50 figure was the first price in the pricing section of the SimpleDB page – not a smart move (sticker shock). The storage price is now the last thing in the pricing section.

I spend a bunch of time talking to folks working at other startups. I hear about EC2 and S3 usage all the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone using SimpleDB. I hadn’t really thought about it too much. I had noticed that the price for storage in SimpleDB is (was) 10 times higher than for storage in S3, and thought that created an opportunity for Fluidinfo. But that huge difference is now gone – in fact SimpleDB is now free for everyone for the first 6 months following the public beta.

I found myself asking “What’s going on?” It’s not like Amazon to suddenly offer their services for free. The free offer coming with the service entering beta seemed pretty thin. If anything it should get more expensive, or stay the same, not suddenly transition to free.

Then I began to explicitly wonder just how many people are actually using SimpleDB. So I just ran some sample Google queries to get an idea. The results are amazing:

Note that all queries are entered into Google in quotes.

Given just these results, and knowledge that SimpleDB was launched a year ago, I think you’d have to conclude that SimpleDB is a complete flop. Either that or Google is playing evil tricks due to their own appEngine offering. That would seem unlikely. Plus, the numbers for the obviously popular S3 and EC2 are much much higher: If you try these queries with S3 or EC2 instead of SimpleDB, you’ll see 5K, 10K, 15K results.

I find the above numbers astounding. I’m deadly curious to know what’s going on here. Was SimpleDB just too expensive to consider using? Is its model too awkward? If it sucked, people would say so. But there’s virtually nothing out there. It’s as though developers took one look and completely ignored it. That would be my guess (in fact it’s what I did, so I’m probably biased in my explanation of what others may have done).

At least we can say that more people love SimpleDB than hate it :-)

It’s not my intention to bash Amazon or AWS. I love and use S3 and EC2 every single day. They’ve changed the world, and this is only the beginning. But I have no use at all for SimpleDB. I’d always assumed it was a big success too, but it looks like that may be wrong.

Comments very welcome. Do you know anyone using SimpleDB?