Why am I seeing a lot of web hosts say that they do not allow torrents / irc comms from servers they host? SURE I can understand when it comes to VPS / Reseller / Shared, but a dedicated? When you are given a set bandwidth and allowance per month?

Why is there seemingly a trend to not allow these?

I won't point fingers but when I was looking for a webhost about a year back allllll the web hosts I got recommended to were all the same "no p2p / no irc" among the others, there was of course the standard "no spam / warez" etc. But on a dedicated? Where the traffic on that dedicated box shouldn't (in my mind) be able to affect OTHER users who ... don't use your dedicated box?

Or is there something I am missing here in the greater scheme of 1's and 0's?

FWIW - those same web hosts still say "no we don't allow these, even a few of them go as far as "no gaming servers".

1. Due to the amount of people out there who will use P2P for illegal file downloads, It's basically stopping them from being Liable for Copyright Infringement in the first place.

2. IRC servers previously had a habit of being the subjects of DDOS attacks, the same goes for Gaming servers.

It's a case of if you do anything Illegal(Copyright Infringement), and get caught, you're cut off without being able to get your data back, or money back in alot of cases.

i believe the reasoning for IRC is due to the fact that they are often the targets of denial of service attacks.

a lot of hosts do not allow games of any kind on their hosting networks for this reason.
they may have a second area/network for gaming/IRC etc

Understandable on the gaming network side of thing.
I've even asked if I could run an IRC client that allows me to connect TO irc servers, but not be an IRC server itself.

Many places are "no" on that count to (IE: irssi or similar).

*shakes fist* Stupid people abusing the good graces of the many

this still baffles me.

if a dedicated server becomes under a DDOS the it will go down. if the network before the last mile can't handle this type of attack then your not really getting value for money as even under legitimate load you could max this out before you reach your servers limit.

as for the copyrighted content argument there is also a lot of legitimate torrents out there, the simple no wares etc material statement would cover this with out having to limit the possible uses for the server.

I disagree - the cost of having multiple gigabits of headroom on each of your transit links (which is what would be required to absorb an attack of decent size) could easily cost well into the low hundred of thousands.

I don't know of any non-B2B host who would have the economy of scale to pull that off.

My thoughts exactly.

To Expand on it, Even if the server goes down, the attack will no doubt continue well beyond the server itself's Limitations. Especially when it's possible that the DDOS can continue on to attack the hosts hardware(Switches, Firewalls, etc) if they are successful in bringing it down temporarily.

my point would be that a host may have its servers on 10mbit connections say. this would then move up to a 1gbit backbone. that server would notice the attack and would go down under the pressure that would notify the admins who could then start to work on the issue. im sure we have all seen a DDOS on a web server that's not running one of these services and have seen a company implement a solution to keep there customers up and running.

and as I'm sure you know the traffic used in a DDOS generally relies on the server at least attempting to reply to the packets to help fill the pipe and magnify the results so as long as the infrastructure is able to hold more then the last mile (so not running a 1gbit carrier and then all servers on 1gbit this would mitigate the potential attack and therefore impact on other customers.

also by your theory even segregating the networks someone else in the data center could bring your network down if they had a DDOS attack on one of there servers that was big enough, and you can't tell me most/all data centers tell you what you can and can't run on your servers as long as its legal.

so the point if really moot, no matter what your running if the DDOS is big enough it will bring a network down. so why restrict something that i very much doubt will attract that big a DDOS in the first place, as the attacks are more likely to be aimed at bringing that server down so there would be no need for that scale of attack.

I'm assuming you haven't heard about the attack on Inticon (A semi-large Wholesale Bandwidth Provider/Hosting Provider) more recently when their network was hammered by a DDOS for a few days and resulted in crippling part of their network.

This all started off as an attack on a certain server from what I've heard about it, and expanded to network hardware. Mind you, they did a very good job to cover it and had minimal overall disruption (Nick, if you're reading this, feel free to correct what I'm saying, as I'm recalling from memory and might not be that accurate).

That's one example of about 2 dozen recent DDOS' I've been aware of which have started off attacking a certain server and moved onto network hardware...

i have heard of some large scale DDOS attacks. but I'm wondering what the initial attacks were aimed at? and what the motive was?

as far as i can see not running a game server wont stop you being attacked.

I know in the states, its a hit and miss with carriers that do and dont block irc ports going into datacentres.

We block all IRC data inbound and outbound from our web hosting/managed services customers but not for our eyeball and transit customers - I feel that, whilst it is a corporate decision on our behalf to not allow IRC within our own environment, we don't have the right to make that choice on behalf of an end user.

Let me get this right: You don't allow IRC / Gaming / Torrent (or whatever it is restricted) on Shared / VPS hosts but if someone has a dedicated you don't restrict?

That is how I would assuming things are.
I might raise this point with my webhost and see what they say, have a dig at them along the lines of "So, you say your networks can't handle high traffic?"

SONET is a Corporate Data provider in QLD as well, that could be what he was referring to?

We don't have any VPS/dedicated service offerings - apart from Chombo (which is just a business unit of SONET anyhow) we are predominantly corporate.

Were we to offer VPS/dedicated in the future we would likely block IRC/P2P on these networks. I see no reason why any corporate would need these services without some pretty specific requirements.

HTTP, SMTP and IPSec account for 80% of our data and I don't doubt that for most corporate providers, this would be the same.

Why risk your network with questionable traffic? I fail to see why anyone would put their network at risk for the sake of a few dedicated clients who are probably going to hammer links with ridiculous peaks anyway.

Business customers pay their invoices on time too