My current data center provider, Hosted Solution, announced they are discontinuing their router-based ACL/Firewall service.

This has been in place for years and frankly provided a lot of security.

Since they were blocking at the outside router, instead of on the internal network things have been very safe and quiet since the day my servers were installed.

Now they are asking us to either implement comparable firewalls on every server, or pay them to install a firewall appliance for $199 or more each month, which will consume one of our paid rack spaces.

If it wasn’t such short notice, I would seriously consider moving the servers elsewhere.

I wonder how this will affect our bandwidth costs, given that malicious traffic will now make it inside the network, past the router they measure our usage on?