Inventory update, Account sharing and fair-(ab)use - Bytesized Hosting

Hi all \o

tl;dr 1: We're going to crack down on account sharers and resellers. tl;dr 2: +Stream hosted by Bytesized take around 24/48 hours to be deployed, other plans still on instant deployment.

Account sharing abuse

In the last few months we've seen more and more abuse of our +Stream plans. It's becoming very common for some members to buy the cheapest plan available and share their Plex server with hundreds of other Plex users, sometimes for free, sometimes against a monetary compensation. This is obviously NOT ALLOWED. Bytesized can create affordable plans because nobody is using their box 24/7 and we count on this fact. With abuse like this not only is a box being used 24/7, it's used by dozens of users at the same time. Of course you are free to share a Plex account with friends and family but within reason. From now on we are going to start aggressively suspending users abusing our freedom of use. For those that are among the abusers, please get a +Dedi so that the whole server is yours to do with as you please or risk your account being suspended.

Inventory update

I also wanted to give quick update about our +Stream plan availability as new members are currently looking at slower-than-instant deployments, something we haven't had in a while.

The past few years deployments were always instant, whenever we had a shortage of spots coming up I would buy new hardware and deploy it before we actually ran out of available boxes. This time however we have hit the hard power limit in our datacenter and we can't simply buy new hardware anymore to solve the issue. The issue is two-fold.

• Buying a new cabinet is a huge investment and requires not only a new cabinet, breaks, power but also switch and new uplinks to our network-provider;
• The last time I talked with our datacenter the whole datacenter itself was at maximum capacity and more cabinets would mean moving everything to one of their other datacenters;

I'm meeting with my account manager on Wednesday to see what other options we have on the short term to get more hardware online. Until that time the only deployments that happen are when users cancel accounts and they get deleted. Expect new deployments to be delayed by 24 to 48 hours. Again this is only for +Stream plans hosted by Bytesized, the Leaseweb based plan is still on instant deployment as are all other plans.

Till next time \o

Animazing