[blantonl]

I don't think his comment was focused on John or Jane Q Public, but rather the general use of cloud services and the dangers of these types of events happening.

For instance, I host most of my business on AWS. We recently had a compromised server that delivered malware to some of our Web visitors resulting in Google completely blacklisting our site, and ultimately resulting in AWS sending us a threatening notification that we were violating their terms of service by serving malware and we could be terminated at any time.

Within an hour of finding out the root cause we cleaned up the malware issue, but we spent the next 24 hours trying to get Google to remove the blacklist and kept our fingers crossed that AWS wouldn't just terminate all our 17+ instances and ask questions later - effectively putting us out of business.

Welcome to the cloud!

[mattzito]

This has always been the way it works with hosting providers and even colocation facilities. You have an obligation to keep your infrastructure healthy, or the provider has an obligation to shut you down before they get a reputation for being malware/spam/badness-friendly and have to worry about their peering relationships and the like.

Nothing new here because it's "the cloud".

[eloisant]

Well, the Amazon approach is much better than the Google approach. At least they sent a notice, while Google's policy is "shoot first, discuss later". Well actually the first part, I'm not sure if there is a second part.