How much does a firewall rule cost?
If your answer to this question is something along the lines of “probably the time it takes to set it up, if anything” you’re probably on the same wavelength as I am. You wouldn’t however even be on the same planet as Arsys! Please allow me to explain the frustrating day I’ve had with this popular and IMHO overrated Spanish web hosting company.
At my morning job, we decided to set up our own internal Jabber server. MSN was on the blink and moving away from Microsoft is something I’m always eager to promote at any time. So, as I’ve done several times before, I began the process of configuring our dedicated server so that Ejabberd was working fine and tested using the joys of SSH port forwarding.
Arsys on all their dedicated servers provide a firewall by default, this I know, so I set the gears marching for them to open the necessary ports to allow our Jabber conversations to flow freely.
1st problem. Turns out it costs 30 euros per month for them to open these ports as they are non-standard (eh?). Its not much in relative terms, but we’re talking a single change for a few minutes of work on an already existing firewall which ends up costing a total of 324 euros over 12 months. My reaction was of course; ditch the firewall, I’ll add my own using Linux and iptables!
2nd problem. Turns out it costs 30 euros per month to deactivate the firewall! (EH?) This is really quite annoying, how is it turning something like this off has a monthly cost?! Crazy. We do have contacts in Arsys who might have been able to help us by-pass this, but for 30 euros we might look a bit silly calling the CEO. In the end we decided to swallow deeply and go with the already present firewall.
3rd problem. Turns out it costs 30 euros per month per 10 rules! (WTF!!!) Jabber needs three open ports, all incoming and outgoing, and for convenience I’d said TCP and UDP; that’s 12 rules in total. They wanted 60 euros per month for the privilege! Totally unbelievable. In the end I removed the UDP rules and stuck with 9. Clearly if we want anything else, its cheaper to ditch the firewall and as a consequence loose any slim chance of security it offers.
Poorly thought out customer support policies like this, only serve to annoy, especially when dealing with someone clue-full enough to know what a firewall really is. Lets also not forget the amount of time we spent sending emails back and forth to sort this out, and all for a few minutes of their time to make the necessary change. I feel abused.
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