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Comment by dsmcr | Hacker News Reader

You guys were one of the best use cases for the SL model, which really hasn't changed in 10+ years. You had very few dependencies on the less-reliable (read: all of them) services inside the SL stack and mostly managed everything on box and in software. In a few POPs you guys were running about 50% of the total SL backbone bandwidth. There were a lot of sad panda hats when you guys started to transition away.

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> There were a lot of sad panda hats when you guys started to transition away.

For us as well. It was so nice to have things work one day and the next and the next, although I guess they wouldn't have worked today.

Favorite firefighting moment was when wdc lost half the fiber in ~ 2014, and we had to move all of our traffic out, so that there was capacity. Our guy asked why we had to move? and your guy said something like 'Because if you guys move, we only need one customer to move.' :D

Yeah the move from FreeBSD to Linux wouldn't have been fun for you guys either. And yeah, the WDC POPs were some of the most overbuilt from a bandwidth perspective and that was almost entirely because of you guys. Pretty sure there's a Cisco sales rep enjoying a nice holiday home in Connecticut as a result of the growth you guys did.

Dunno if I should realize who toast0 is, but what service were/are you running?

I don't think you are expected to know who I am :) I omitted the service on purpose, but you my email is on my profile if you want to know.

Apparently it was enough information for dsmcr to properly id the service though; not enough for nixgeek though, I think.

Sorry, didn't mean to put you on blast like that.

Don't worry about it. Not a problem at all. Happy to interact with people on the other side of the tickets ;)

I won't ask that directly. It just seemed like I was missing something that everyone else knew.

They’re talking about WhatsApp.

Probably WhatsApp, they moved from FreeBSD to Linux and were on SL before the Facebook acquisition.

I had a high bandwidth use case that SL filled when I was a kid - but we went through resellers 10TB/UK2, later 100TB after that was a thing, then they dropped SL and every one of SL's products became AWS-priced levels of insane per GB bandwidth.

The odd thing is, for half the price I could get SL service w/10TB from a reseller, while at list price I only got 1-2TB bandwidth, and sales absolutely would not budge on that. I wonder why.

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