Hi Guys
Anybody on here have any suggestion about a smaller data centre (i.e. not AWS, Azure etc.) in the USA for hosting FusionHubs? Netflix are getting very aggressive at blocking AWS IPs which is a problem with my maritime customers. I’ve sorted this in the UK easily by spinning them up on a DC here but haven’t got any contacts in the US. Hoping someone can help.
Cheers
Matt
I’m a big fan of Linode, and they have several US datacenters. However, spinning up a fusionhub in a linode does require a bit of tinkering. I posted some information about that recently. Once it’s running, it works amazingly well.
I don’t know if netflix is banning linode IPs yet. I have the reverse DNS entry for my server within my own domain (forward and reverse matching) and haven’t seen any issue yet, but I don’t send all traffic via the VPN link for the main site (speedfusion bonding is EXPENSIVE, and I don’t want to lose the benefits of my dual link for load balancing), so I haven’t tested netflix specifically in this configuration.
I hope this is helpful,
Jim
Many thanks for this. Much appreciated. I’ll definitely check them out. Sounds perfect.
Just a quick one, when you say the SpeedFusion is expensive, do you mean the traffic or the hardware/licencing? My clients don’t mind about the hardware costs but they will be running a lot of traffic through this, will Linode charge me through the nose for this.
Cheers
Matt
Vultr is another great option. Very cheap, fast, and reliable.
I was referring to the license for speedfusion to activate it for my transit duo. Linode’s plans include an amount of data (2TB/month in the tier I am using), and then seems reasonably charged for any overage above that. Their pricing is all clearly laid out on their website, and they have a dashboard that lets you see how much data you’ve used.
From their pricing page:
What happens if I exceed my monthly transfer quota?
You will be invoiced $0.02 for each GB over your pooled network transfer quota. Please note that all inbound traffic is free and will not count against your quota.
That’s useful for a VPN, because you don’t want to pay for those bits twice. 
You can also contact them, they have always been very responsive.
Again, just a satisfied customer.
jim
AWS (Ireland) is US$0.09 per Gb which works out to $90 per Tb so if you are using Tb’s per month then you will be paying a bit but most of our customers are also maritime and don’t put anywhere near a Tb through SpeedFusion each month. $0.02 per Gb after 2 Tb sounds like a great price!
Hey Matt
We stopped using SpeedFusion for Netflix over a year ago because they where doing trace routes and picking up on the latency between the public IP address and LAN IP address of the device running NetFlix. This is how they where determining we where using a VPN.
We proved this by spinning up a linux machine in AWS and gave it the public IP address from our FusionHub. When we accessed Netflix on the linux machine, it worked! We then switched the IP back to the FusionHub and got the same error.
If i remember the error was pretty generic like “we have detected you are using a Proxy or VPN, please disable this and try to access our service again”
This was at about the same time Netflix because much more international and relaxed about the content you can access in different countries.
Hi Guys
Many thanks for all your advice, much appreciated. I’ve now tried quite a lot of these (including Linode, Vultr and Joe’s Data Center amongst others). All are blocked by Netflix. We have no problems at all with our small UK data centre but UK Netflix bars all the AWS IPs I’ve tried. If they are doing it by latency then it must allow quite a lot of leeway and they are also doing it via other methods.
I have now found a way to access US Netflix which works (for now) but is not fully tested yet. I’ve got it working from my PC but am conducting a trial with some Apple TV boxes later in the week (hopefully) so will keep you updated.
Am obviously a bit reluctant to post on here how I’ve done it in case someone from Netflix sees it but you can private message me if you want more info.
Cheers Again
Matt