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Contabo blackholed my prefix, no SLA credit—when do you abandon a troubled provider?

General Discussion by danfra 6 replies 313 views
danfra

Member OP

#1

I've been on Contabo's anycast for 18 months. Their scrubbing layer held against 340 Gbps in January. Last month, same attack profile, 180 Gbps, they blackholed my prefix for 4 hours. No SLA credit, no post-mortem.

Migration is 40+ zones, custom rules, signed contracts with my upstreams. Sunk cost is real. At what point do you cut losses versus ride out degradation?

My current read: filtering capacity dropped 47% with no transparency. But re-tooling elsewhere is 3-4 weeks of exposure during transition.

mitigated 800Gbps before breakfast
FlowSana

Member

SRE

#2
danfra said:
At what point do you cut losses versus ride out degradation?
  • Define objective failure criteria before emotional attachment forms. My thresholds:
    • Two consecutive missed SLAs without root cause within 72 hours.
    • Degradation of scrubbing capacity below advertised 95th percentile.
    • Loss of BGP session visibility or RTBH control.
  • Your 47% capacity drop with no disclosure violates criterion b. Contabo's scrubbing layer is likely oversubscribed post-consolidation.
  • Migration pain is temporary. Route leaks during transition are manageable with prepends and conservative TTLs.
  • Recommend: initiate parallel setup on secondary provider, shift 10% traffic for 14 days to validate filtering parity, then cutover. Document everything for chargeback if SLA credits are denied.
It's always DNS. Always.
minh1987

Member

#3

In my country, transit cost make multi-homing difficult. Provider here often oversell scrubbing 3:1 or worse.

What monitoring you use to catch blackhole event? My own setup miss prefix withdrawal sometimes. BGPmon too expensive for small operation.

Practical question: can you negotiate exit with partial refund if they fail published SLA? Or they ignore request like in my country?

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
OwnerSeeker

Member

Small Biz

4 #4

They said it was normal. I don't know about Gbps but my storage was full, I added more RAM from Hetzner and now it works better.

Contabo sounds like my old vendor DYNACORP. They also had problems. I stayed 2 years because the contract was hard to read. My nephew says I should have left sooner. How do you read these contracts? I just sign where they highlight.

JA

Member

#5

What os runs the scrubbing layer, I heard they changed stack recently

lucgone

Member

Le Baguette

#6

47% drop and no post-mortem? That's the threshold.

Vive la résistance... électrique
SY

Member

#7

I had the same blackhole issue with them last year, no explanation either

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