Is VLOUUM a secure tracker ? (13)
This post is in no way trying to put the service down,
I am just really curious & this cloud hosting security is wayyyy beyond my knowledge at this point.
Is your data really safe & private on a cloud hosted tracker?
The design looks AWESOME & i love the idea behind the tracker...
I am still signing up & will test it out,
but just curious as to what someone that knows more than me can explain
i would love for all that its promising to be true
anyone using it that has any experience with it??
heres the quote from
"Is cloud hosting safe? Can I trust you with my campaigns?
Many affiliates are skeptical of cloud hosted tracking solutions. We can’t blame them.
Money making landing pages, offers, and traffic sources are an affiliates livelihood.
However, self-hosting applications is an archaic approach.
If someone really wanted to see your campaigns, they would be able to do so with relative ease.
At
not even internally in our company.
We will be stepping this up for super-affiliates in the near future with login security similar to online banking."
You should research and see what the company who bought Prosper did to people who used the hosted version.
Personally I will not use any hosted platforms, they do not need to have access to my data. If you use any, you are a dumbass and deserve to have all your campaigns stolen.
I have nothing bad to say about the service, this is just my opinion on hosted solutions. If they offered a self hosted version I would love to give it a try but they don't seem to want to answer that question.
I looked at
Their holding of the data is unfortunately the deal-breaker.
If I was running 100,000 clicks a day or more I might consider
The creator/owner is on STM so I guess he will chip in at some stage. I have not been convinced by the argument of bank-like security to access our data, when it's still on their server... we can't really be sure they're not accessing it.
I personally will use VLOUUM only in two cases:
1) you are too small (they will not be even interested to copy you)
2) you are too big (enough competitive advantage, that in case they will consider copy you it will be damm hard)
Otherwise until they will create self hosted solution, I might just signup to test and see their features but will not run with them the money campaigns
When you getting big enough you need to afraid, but when you small you need to move fast as you can, even break some roles (like FB roles not FTC laws) to grow as fast as you can
You're never going to know the answer to the question: are your data being stolen? When you put your data in a place where someone else controls the access to your data, that's just a risk you have to take. You can never know the answer.
Take someone like Nanigans, a major Facebook API player with large brand clients as well as performance types. How do they become great at what they do? As their client base gets larger and larger, they were able to learn so many things from past campaigns and data so that new clients' success rates increase exponentially.
Is that stealing? Or just a benefit of having data? When they have all this data, are they really going to start from scratch when they get a client like Hulu when they have already learned a million things that worked or didn't work from when they worked with Netflix (just an example)? I can guarantee you, they are not split testing creatives and funnels from scratch. You can bet your ass they're not just going to let the data sit there, but they're not going to advertise to their clients and say, hey, we're going to learn what works with you so we can apply those strategies to your next competitor who we get as a client.
However, that's not stealing in my opinion. Nanigans owns the data. It would be a very stupid decision to ignore and not learn from past campaigns and apply them to new ones. Starting from scratch when you don't have to. Obviously, straight up copying campaigns as-is is wrong, but who is to police that if you just change creatives and offers? Therefore, you just have to take it as a potential risk and balance the risk and reward of the service, based partly on the integrity of the company behind it. You'll never get the question answered.
P.S. I will say this... I personally know of at least 2 traffic sources (think big name mobile ad network/dsp's) who have run massive internal direct response buys in the past. They know exactly what works based on the campaigns running in their systems. It goes again to the fact that sometimes, it's just a risk you take, because SOMEONE will see your data if they wanted to. The rationale that you should hide data from tracking providers and affiliate networks, but traffic sources themselves are perfectly risk-free is bogus.
First thing, I think I have to change the name of our project VLOUUM, it sounds better 
In regards to your data security, I can tell you one thing that you already know: reputation in this industry is everything. We've sunk more time and money than I'd have liked to into this project. We spent 1 year alone building the database technology that drives
We've designed the system so that the only data we see for our users is the overall volumes that they do. This limits our ability when it comes to support, but we realize that campaign data is highly sensitive to most of our clients.
Finally, I would like to say that just because you have a self-hosted solution, doesn't make your data any more secure.. in my opinion, on the contrary.
If you'd like to discuss this further I'd be happy to!
Originally Posted by getzlaf15
But back to the original question for this thread, I think the real question on your mind should be if it makes sense to upgrade to a cloud solution or not. Because I for one think it's almost impossible to stay in biz as a hosted tracker while stealing campaigns from your users.
Imagine how silly it would be to think that just because CAKE, Hasoffers, LinkTrust, ShareASale etc can see everything the networks are doing they are suddenly going to steal everything that works and start running a network on the side with all the data.
Don't get me wrong, your data is important and should be secured. The thing I want more people to understand is that, they are not automatically more secure just because they host everything on their own servers.
Also don't forget about some of the down sides of self hosted. For example, despite all the claims, I haven't heard of a single self hosted tracker (Prosper202 included) on the market that works smoothly at high click counts (millions a day/week/month). I'm pretty sure that all the self hosted tracking solutions currently manage this by deleting old clicks (aka your precious data), but is that really a solution?
When you are just starting out or not sending millions of clicks a month, self hosted will work fine for you. But once you scale, issues crop up.
So how will you know when you should look at other options?
You will know when you should look at a cloud solution when 1-5% in extra profit or 1-5% less click loss comes out to be a very big number.
You'll know when you are deleting clicks every day because your reports timeout or take 10 mins to load.
You'll know when you are constantly having to reboot your server because it just crashed again for the 3 time today due the the amount of clicks you are sending through it.
Weigh the risks and rewards of self hosted and cloud hosted, there are pros and cons for both options. While you are doing that, realize that you have a similar or in some cases a worse risk profile with a self hosted solution especially one hosted with the wrong hosting provider.
Think about it.
1) Is your hosting provider run by robots or humans?
What's stopping employees at your hosting company with from looking at and stealing your data? There's a perception of security, privacy, and control when it comes to hosting your tracking solution that's not really 100% true when you think about it. 2) Who's making sure the servers are up to date with the latest security patches and updates. How many "My tracker got hacked because I didn't set it up correctly" threads have you read?
3) How many backups do you have in place. If your database crashed right now, how long would it take to be back up and running? How about if your server crashed? You've got it all load balanced right?
TL;DR Worrying about your data being stolen by a hosted tracking platform is largely overrated. Instead think of what option will help you solve your current business problems, sometimes it means using a hosted solution over a self hosted solution.
PS: One of my goals with Prosper202 is to eventually create a self hosted solution that's simple to setup and scales to manage the needs of 90% of the market's needs. But even with that, the only way to really do this properly is to work closely with a hosting company that will agree to do some of the heavy lifting needed to pull this off.
Good points by Nana here but you should also consider that the so-called cloud hosting is also susceptible if people mean to be malicious. At the end of the day it depends on the amount of money you make per annum. Because if it's a case where you make 1-2 mil per year, I would invest in my own solutions.
Originally Posted by Mr Baffoe
Originally Posted by Mr Baffoe
I think as tracking providers, it makes the job much easier to provide everything cloud. When a self-hosted solution's code is encrypted, there's no way to tell if it is more secure, but when source code is open like in Prosper, the security is in fact higher.
So in my opinion, it's just something that the users have to decide for themselves: less hassle in setup/bug fixes/server issues in hosted solutions, but the data is accessible to the provider, or the headache of procuring the right server/more hassle in setup/dealing with server issues, but your data is more secure. To each his own, and as service providers you have to provide whatever the market demands is all.
Originally Posted by pain2k
Once you have people involved there's greed and the possibility to be malicious.
Even when you invest in your own solution unless you do everything yourself (which wouldn't be the best use of your time), your employees could run of with your data
At least with that, it's more possible to evaluate the people you hire to make sure they have integrity.
Originally Posted by ffclogin
Awesome to hear that your self-hosted solution scales. without having to delete data. Originally Posted by ffclogin
It's true that you have the human factor involved, there's always a possibility for a data breach from internal and external sources, and contrary to popular belief going self-hosted doesn't remove this risk. It just does a very good job of making it appear to not exist because I think affiliates feel like they own the server and no one has access to it. I think providers like us and the hosting companies can mitigate this risk by putting strong security measures in place, and most importantly, making sure you have a staff of GOOD, TRUSTWORTHY individuals.
Eg what
As a former affiliate, I understand that for many clients one of their biggest assets is the data in the tracking platform. So I guard it like it was my own, because my business success is based off growing my client's business.
Finally, I'd hate to be proven wrong because it would only serve to make it harder to do business as a hosted solution provider. But I also don't think other providers are in business to steal data.
I completely understand your sentiment, Nana, and total respect by the way for Prosper202. I've also met Robert and the
And I do agree with your point about someone having access to your data no matter what you do. That's what I stated as well in my initial response, and we are essentially all on the same side on the issue as service providers (it's better for our businesses in almost all ways).
If I had to be devil's advocate though. Limiting the access to only those who are more removed from your immediate business, such as hosting companies and system admins, mitigates risk. If it's not true, large media or enterprises would never care about security or about private vs public cloud. There's always employees, colo administrators, or anyone who was granted temporary access. However, it's the limiting factor that mitigates data exposure and risk, but I agree 0 risk can never be achieved.
Secondly, there can be state-of-the-art internal security for hosted solutions, but unfortunately, our industry hasn't advanced to the stage where we have a 3rd party "auditor" to verify said security. I actually think that can be a major business as a lot of startups are trying to sell to the enterprise, claiming high security, but there's no one giving a stamp of approval. We trust banks' security because it's all highly regulated and audited.
Lastly, as I did mention before, I've had the disappointment of witnessing 2 major DSP's use their wealth of data, see what verticals, what kind of offers, what type of funnels work, and run massive internal media buys with it. I can't name them since everything was told in confidence, but they're both major names, 1 still running strong and the other is now under a different flag. I do not know if they're still engaging in any of that.
I hope I'm not coming off as argumentative. I'm actually not sure exactly why I'm bringing up these points, since I would love for everyone to wholeheartedly accept hosted solutions, which would save us a TON of headaches and would make much better business overall. Maybe because I still feel like an affiliate, and it's a discussion that should be had at least once so that everything is transparent. I'm hesitant to click Post.. so I think it's the last time I'm going to play devil's advocate on this issue lol, not that a few words from little ol' me on a forum will sway market sentiment anyway.
Originally Posted by ffclogin
I don't want to pretend there are companies out there not using the data they collect to run internal campaigns, and unfortunately this kind of behavior hurts everyone (Other solution providers and affiliates).
I see a day when this will not be as much of an issue, but until then we as service providers have to earn and most importably keep the trust of affiliates by not using the data collected in anyway unless the affiliate that generated it is aware of it and approves.
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