Reformed Spammer Turns to CDNs With Aflexi

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, January 6. 2009 at 10:00 AM EST 4 comments

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

What do you get when you put together a former spam hoster, CDNs, and Malaysia? It yields Aflexi, a company that sells software designed to enable Webhosting companies and regional ISPs to get into the content delivery business.

CEO Whei-Meng Wong, who has spent the last several years running Web hosting companies out of his home country of Malaysia, is running Aflexi under the belief that ordinary ISPs can become CDNs with the use of his software.

Aflexi, which Wong says is short for "a flexible CDN network," hopes to license its software to smaller service providers, which will enable those companies to begin offering CDN services to clients without making the large upfront commitment that's normally required.

The software works by aggregating the CDN capabilities of multiple service providers, allowing them to benefit from the size of the overall network of companies using its services. A software license costs $150 per month, and will allow the service provider to install as many copies as it likes throughout its network. Customers can also connect to Aflexi's "marketplace" of CDN service providers and leverage the networks of all Aflexi customers.

The business essentially amounts to cheap CDN services replicating themselves on small ISPs worldwide, which sounds like it could be the CDN world's worst nightmare. The question is what Wong's reputation as a former spam hoster will mean. Wong admits facilitating the spam business with his former hosting associations, one of which was Offshoremode.com, which was well known for hosting spammers and bulk email servers, according to a listing at the Spamhaus Project's Record of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO).

In a comment on the Gartner blog post covering his company, Wong admitted that he had worked with certain well-known spammers in the past, but claims that he is reformed and now focused on Aflexi:

The ROKSO guy listed in Spamhaus is me, but I'm no longer dealing with the guys listed in my profile. Aflexi is my new business that I'm pursuing and [I] do not have intention to look back but [am] learning from the past.

Gartner Inc. analyst Lydia Leong, who noted Wong's less-than-stellar past in her blog entry on the company, says that dealing with its founder's history is not the only challenge that Aflexi will face. While the company has come up with an interesting angle on tackling the CDN market, she says there are plenty of questions about the company and its business model.

While Leong believes that there is definitely a market for CDN aggregation, or CDN arbitrage, she thinks that it's more likely to be made up of larger service providers, not the small Web hosts that Aflexi says is its target market.

There are also questions about the sophistication of the company's software -- i.e., if it does what it says it does -- and the availability of service-level agreements for hosts that plan to use its software. Because Aflexi is just now signing up potential customers, the company's software hasn't been battle-tested in true network conditions.

Finally, although Aflexi has received funding from the Malaysian government, there are questions about the management team's experience. Leong notes that the company's staff is "the equivalent of three guys in a garage."

"They have a bunch of ambition, but it seems like some inexperienced folks are working on this," Leong says.