Zen IP location?

Anyone else seeing this location when tracert or pinging Zen this morning?

Tracing route to zen.co.uk [54.76.156.29]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms *****
2 24 ms 24 ms 25 ms losubs.subs.dsl2.wh-man.zen.net.uk [62.3.87.147]
3 28 ms 25 ms 24 ms ae1-114.cr1.wh-man.zen.net.uk [62.3.87.169]
4 32 ms 30 ms 32 ms ge-3-0-0-0.cr2.th-lon.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.45]
5 31 ms 31 ms 32 ms 195.66.225.175
6 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms 178.236.3.53
7 36 ms 36 ms 35 ms 176.32.106.29
8 37 ms 36 ms 36 ms 178.236.0.187
9 41 ms 42 ms 41 ms 178.236.0.206
10 41 ms 41 ms 43 ms 178.236.1.189
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

It's terminating in Ireland https://db-ip.com/all/54.76.156

http://imgur.com/JdT5JeL
http://imgur.com/aDnoNE5
http://imgur.com/PnUlBBV

I did phone them this morning but it does seem strange, I think he said this is where the nod was terminating.

At a guess it looks like Zen have moved their website to the Amazon AWS infrastructure.

Text
1 23 45 67 89	C:\Users\Stuart>nslookup www.zen.co.uk Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.comAddress:  2001:4860:4860::8888  Non-authoritative answer: Name:    www.aws2.zen.co.ukAddresses:  54.77.177.213           54.154.104.202Aliases:  www.zen.co.uk

Amazon do have a facility in Ireland.

Text
1 23 45 67 89 1011	inetnum:        178.236.0.0 - 178.236.7.255 netname:        IE-AMAZONdescr:          Amazon Data Services Ireland country:        IEadmin-c:        ADSI2-RIPE tech-c:         ADSI2-RIPEstatus:         ASSIGNED PA mnt-by:         MNT-ADSIcreated:        2010-11-15T21:39:27Z last-modified:  2012-06-27T12:43:19Zsource:         RIPE # Filtered

In reply to a post by aquilla:

At a guess it looks like Zen have moved their website to the Amazon AWS infrastructure.

Oh dear, hardly a ringing endorsement for their hosting products!

It's probably related to them reselling AWS services. https://www.zen.co.uk/enterprise/our-services/cloud-...

I can understand Zen reselling AWS in order to give their clients additional flexibility and redundancy but using it in preference to in-house facilities for their own websites sends the wrong message to potential customers. Why should I host with Zen if they are unwilling to do so themselves?

In reply to a post by AndyS:

I can understand Zen reselling AWS in order to give their clients additional flexibility and redundancy but using it in preference to in-house facilities for their own websites sends the wrong message to potential customers. Why should I host with Zen if they are unwilling to do so themselves?

Agreed, when an ISP doesn't host their own website it is very, very dubious imho. The only thing they should perhaps be hosting on another host is their status page.

If any Zen staff are reading this I think you need to raise this with your senior management, like AndyS said it really does give a very bad impression.

So any of the zen gurus like to say how long the Irish route is going to stay for?

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Agreed, when an ISP doesn't host their own website it is very, very dubious imho. The only thing they should perhaps be hosting on another host is their status page.

There was a DDoS on at least part of the public web presence not so long ago - IIRC it knocked the customer portal randomly offline for much of a weekend. Whatever the arguments about what looks good or not, what matters most is that the operations staff took whatever measures they felt necessary to restore service.

As has been said, Zen resell AWS. Amazon will have far greater resources available at short notice than Zen can muster in house.

I can't believe you're actually serious, what does it matter where they host their website? AWS have resillience that smaller ISP's can't begin to hope to replicate, you can have resillience across multiple continents if you so wish. If an ISP chooses to host offnet in a resillient way using a product they sell what concern is it?

This would be the resilience that has seen the Zen websites off line for 5 hours today?

I noticed early this morning couldn't log in to the portal ,after being kicked from the gateway i had been on for weeks, when i was hosting a server for an online game, just had to hop back onto that gateway as the one i connected to is having a jitter fest Zen you need to sort out your capacity from Manchester to London or whatever is causing the jitter

jitter fest
more jitter

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 22-Oct-15 14:15:48)

In reply to a post by Samadeus:

I can't believe you're actually serious, what does it matter where they host their website?

It is all about showing confidence in your product. Would you give your child a toy from a manufacturer who claims "our product is perfectly safe" but does not allow their own children to play with it?

By outsourcing their own website Zen are tacitly acknowledging that their in-house data centres are not up to the task of delivering even a simple mostly static website.

In reply to a post by Samadeus:

I can't believe you're actually serious, what does it matter where they host their website? ...

I'm mostly in agreement with you. The net is not the same thing it was 15 years ago. The landscape is very different. Considering Zen, last time I looked, are specifically a broadband provider, not a cloud hosting provider, I think it makes sense to outsource part of their infrastructure to another company which can (supposedly) host it better than they can.

14:58 .......... yet again off line, the site has crashed 4 times since it was supposedly repaired at 11:00 hrs.

Umm ....

Hosting & Domains | Business | Zen Internet
https://www.zen.co.uk/business/hosting-and-domains/
Domain names, web hosting, dedicated servers, managed hosting & colocation services make up Zen's Business Hosting & Domains solutions.

Zen is all about hosting .......

Noted, but none of that is "cloud hosting". I do agree, however, that their move to AWS does seem to indicate that they believe AWS to be more reliable than their own hosting infrastructure. I do have to question if the person who made that decision internally has researched this "presumption" in detail, because it sometimes is not the case.

But so what if it is more reliable? I personally still don't see what the big deal is. I don't host with them anyway. Maybe if I did, I would see things differently. But their roots are in broadband. I called them up over a decade ago to enquire about Linux hosting (dedicated servers) and they were not even offering those. I admit, I found that odd at the time, and personally, that was enough to demonstrate to me that they were not a serious hosting provider, certainly compared to other companies around at that time. So in my opinion, hosting has never been their strong point anyway; purely an after thought for a company founded by the demand for broadband in the UK.

Because its cheaper than maintaining a server room and constantly updating hardware/software. With AWS, they do it all for you, and if you need extra capacity its simple.

We have been using AWS for over a year now and it's much better than our previous array of servers and is more reliable.

You'll find the cloud hosting here > https://www.zen.co.uk/enterprise/

But they can't keep their web page up and running ......... it's down again.

Edited by deleted (Thu 22-Oct-15 15:55:35)

Zen own a damn great data centre !

But they re-sell AWS for "their cloud hosting", right?

May be using AWS for there own site shows they can manage a complex set of web applications in such an environment.
Maybe there site is a target for DDOS they didn't want there customers to be affected by an attack on there website.

Many company's resell services such as AWS, sometime customers just want to fire up an extra cloud server for testing. Why / how could a small company compete with AWS?
Sometimes customers want an AWS service but need a service wrapper around it too. Maybe they want a DB or App server hosted in a much more secure / stable / ... way than AWS can offer them but there front end web servers matter much less.

There are many and varied reasons for wanting to use a service such as AWS and for not wanting to deal with AWS directly.

In reply to a post by Samadeus:

I can't believe you're actually serious, what does it matter where they host their website? AWS have resillience that smaller ISP's can't begin to hope to replicate, you can have resillience across multiple continents if you so wish. If an ISP chooses to host offnet in a resillient way using a product they sell what concern is it?

I am very serious, Zen have a massive hosting/datacentre division (as well as web dev) and boast all this uptime and expertise and private cloud, and then go and host their own website on someone elses equipment. What sort of message does that give out to customers? Why on earth would an large business ever consider using Zen to host any of their servers etc when Zen don't even host their own website on their own servers/infrastructure?

This is what happens though when people at the top who are not technical (or even business oriented tbh) make silly decisions on cost cutting grounds.

Remember an ISP is a technical business selling technical services, as such it should be doing all this stuff in house, not doing it in house just gives out the wrong message.

In reply to a post by mixt:

But their roots are in broadband. I called them up over a decade ago to enquire about Linux hosting (dedicated servers) and they were not even offering those. I admit, I found that odd at the time, and personally, that was enough to demonstrate to me that they were not a serious hosting provider, certainly compared to other companies around at that time. So in my opinion, hosting has never been their strong point anyway; purely an after thought for a company founded by the demand for broadband in the UK.

Zen push their hosting offering very strongly actually and were very quick to shout about their amazing datacentre in Rochdale etc. I am sure it is very amazing too, so back to the original point you need to wonder why they aren't using it for their own web site.

On a somewhat irrelivant note, look at the TalkTalk hackings, let's say Zen get targeted, do you think they would be able to detect and shut down the hacking attempt on Amazon AWS or if it was hosted internally?

If you have built your own datacentre, claim it is amazing and want to sell it to people, the use it yourself... It's kind of obvious.

We are currently evaluating a hybrid approach to hosting our web sites using a combination of our own infrastructure and AWS. The thinking behind this approach is to give us a higher level of protection against DDoS attacks compared to using our own infrastructure alone. This was prompted by the recent DDoS attacks on our web site. We have not yet decided whether this hybrid approach with AWS will be permanent or whether we�ll remove it in favour of other DDoS mitigation techniques.

We take the security of our infrastructure very seriously. Our infrastructure is attacked on almost a daily basis and most of these attacks are mitigated successfully with minimal or no customer impact. When an attack impacts us � for example, the recent DDoS attack taking down our web site for several hours � then we commit to strengthening our defences so a repeat attack is less likely to cause impact. To strengthen our defences, we will pull on whatever resources and technologies we have available to us.

Zen has its own geographically resilient Cloud platform that is used to power mission-critical applications for a number of our customers. We are also an AWS Consulting Partner and deploy & manage AWS-based mission-critical applications for our customers. Zen Cloud and AWS complement each other. The choice of Zen Cloud, AWS, or a combination of both, for a specific customer depends on that customer�s applications & business needs. We have a team of consultants who assess the needs of our customers and recommend the most appropriate solutions.

Within Zen we have a large and extensive estate of our own infrastructure, but also use AWS in places where it makes sense to do so.