I think this was a hard decision and I really believe that you're trying to protect your business, but I also believe this is the wrong decision.
- Not being able to handle 100s abusive requests is an indication that you can't handle rapid growth. You're going to (want to) host other websites that can grow big and will catch a lot of wind. Although there is no direct revenue for you Pastie.Org was good practice for this it seems also this wasn't a sudden problem (you yourself indicate here that the problem was slowly growing) so this should be no factor in the decision to terminate the hosting so suddenly. Of course if it's more hassle than it's worth you and Pastie can come to an agreement (like stopping next month) but it now sounds like that decision should've been made months earlier or not yet at all.
- Although it's extremely hard to protect yourself from DDOS attacks you've now openly indicated that you're vulnerable and that you will drop things you are committed to do if there is some pressure in order to save the rest of your customers. This will make other customers nervous since they can now be easily threatened and might even go down for the fun of it (I personally don't think it's fun but some people apparently do)
- Even though pastie.org was not generating any revenue and was not a 'customer' you still had a commitment to them and tbh it looks pretty bad that you've one-sidedly decided in an instant to break that commitment, this is really costing you cred.
Of course what's done is done now, but I just wanted to voice my opinion in this debate. Say I'm a devil's advocate here because by the positive comments here mostly you guys seem to be doing mostly good!
- Not being able to handle 100s abusive requests is an indication that you can't handle rapid growth. You're going to (want to) host other websites that can grow big and will catch a lot of wind. Although there is no direct revenue for you Pastie.Org was good practice for this it seems also this wasn't a sudden problem (you yourself indicate here that the problem was slowly growing) so this should be no factor in the decision to terminate the hosting so suddenly. Of course if it's more hassle than it's worth you and Pastie can come to an agreement (like stopping next month) but it now sounds like that decision should've been made months earlier or not yet at all.
- Although it's extremely hard to protect yourself from DDOS attacks you've now openly indicated that you're vulnerable and that you will drop things you are committed to do if there is some pressure in order to save the rest of your customers. This will make other customers nervous since they can now be easily threatened and might even go down for the fun of it (I personally don't think it's fun but some people apparently do)
- Even though pastie.org was not generating any revenue and was not a 'customer' you still had a commitment to them and tbh it looks pretty bad that you've one-sidedly decided in an instant to break that commitment, this is really costing you cred.
Of course what's done is done now, but I just wanted to voice my opinion in this debate. Say I'm a devil's advocate here because by the positive comments here mostly you guys seem to be doing mostly good!