[olug] Cox and Web Servers

[Daniel G. Linder]

Someone wrote:
[Regarding Cox blocking port-80 traffic and other "handy" ports. -Dan]
> It's not terrible business practice.

Mr. Bill Kempf replied:
> Yes, it is.  They don't universally block port 80 (or the other ports), they
> only do so for non-business accounts.  That's unreasonably restrictive, and
> nothing but a ploy to milk their customers of more money.

Actually, it is probably *good* business practice.  Since there is only a finite ammount of money available in the market to support these customers they have to determine ways to keep the most number of customers happy while making a decent profit.  This balancing act has to take into account everything from their Internet access, equipment, maintenance, support, etc.  If they have a critical mass of people who will pay for the *HOME* version of the system which does NOT permit port 80 traffic (among others), then they have made a good business decision.
If they can then charge a higher premium for people who want to host e-mail and web servers from their cable modem, then they need to be charged more.  A customer which hosts a web and an e-mail server from their home will, on the average, require quite a bit more bandwidth than an anverage user who just surfs the Internet from home.  In a perfect world, they could meter the traffic and change on a sliding scale for the bandwith in/out but trying to integrate that into a billing system would be a nightmare...  Thus, this leads to the tiered aproach.  Anyway, can you imagine the suprise when "Joe Sixpack" gets a $250 bill for his home Windows system after a month of running a Nimda/CodeRed trojan!  The billing lines would be jammed with customers demanding a refund, even though their computers *were* using up all that bandwidth.

Someone wrote:
> It's smart security, in the face of Nimda and Code Red.

Mr. Bill Kempf replied:
> That's a security issue for the user, and their responsibility if they
> choose to run such servers.  That's not relevant to Cox.

I would disagree here.  It is EXTREMELY relevant to Cox.  Sure, there are security concerns for the customer ("Did someone just download my Quicken data files and get my account numbers?"), but Cox is the ultimate entity who gets the complaints when all of my neighbors are trying to cross-infect with every known virus/trojan.  *I* complain to Cox when my connection slows to a crawl.  A good company will go to great lengths to keep tech-support calls to a minimum.

Since those of us who would *want* to setup web server at home are in the minority, they can have the best of both worlds:  I can either be happy with my relatively inexpensive high-speed HOME-USER ORIENTED Internet connection.
 -or-
I can purchase a BUSINESS ORIENTED connection and help Cox pay for the bandwidth my server will be using above and beyond their normal surfing traffic.

Dan