The Cloud Mafia: Pay Up, or Lose Your Homepage
I recently helped a client to transition the hosting of their homepage to a cloud hosting provider. My client had received the sales pitch, were convinced by fortune 500 reference clients and assurances of a 99.99% uptime SLO. My client had already spent all the money to build their next homepage inside the cloud provider’s ecosystem. All that was left for me was to deploy it.
Of course, we first ran a test with a non-public domain to make sure the cloud provider’s hosting setup was working as intended. The cloud hoster passed the test (including some AB benchmarks) with flying colors. After redirecting our actual customer-facing domain to the cloud provider, everything was working great!
… or so we thought. Roughly 12 hours after they took over hosting our homepage, we suddenly started seeing HTTP error 429. We reached out to support and they gave us bullshit tasks to do. They asked for access to our root domain DNS zone. They told us to remove our domain in their GUI, wait for 12 hours (where we’d be offline), and then re-add the domain. And oddly enough, after they replied, the problems got a lot worse.
By now, it was broken for most of our staff, including me. Looking at the HTTP request inspector, it was immediately obvious that DNS was working just fine because I could see my browser connect to the correct IPs. And the error 429 reply also included headers specific to our cloud hosting provider, thereby proving that my request had, indeed, reached their server.
