Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth, and allocate them to this purpose. I see four possibilities:
- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server, in which case the third party is losing money and shouldn't be doing this.
- They are paying the third party at least what it costs to rent the server, in which case why aren't they just renting the server themselves? They could probably negotiate a bulk discount.
- They are trying to hide this activity from the cloud server provider by involving third parties. While this may not be a ToS violation as such, I'd guess that if they're hiding it, it is something the cloud providers will want to crack down on if it becomes significant.
- This entire scheme is actually a plan to get access to countries with weird regulatory requirements, e.g. foreign companies are not usually allowed to own servers in China. This one's pretty legit actually, but it's a really complex version of the scheme.
I think at least one of those must be true, and none of them would be a good sign for the future.
Edit: I guess "paying the third party less than their costs" and/or "not making a profit themselves" might be what they mean by "Uber-like", so it would just be an elaborate joke?
- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server, in which case the third party is losing money and shouldn't be doing this.
- They are paying the third party at least what it costs to rent the server, in which case why aren't they just renting the server themselves? They could probably negotiate a bulk discount.
- They are trying to hide this activity from the cloud server provider by involving third parties. While this may not be a ToS violation as such, I'd guess that if they're hiding it, it is something the cloud providers will want to crack down on if it becomes significant.
- This entire scheme is actually a plan to get access to countries with weird regulatory requirements, e.g. foreign companies are not usually allowed to own servers in China. This one's pretty legit actually, but it's a really complex version of the scheme.
I think at least one of those must be true, and none of them would be a good sign for the future.
Edit: I guess "paying the third party less than their costs" and/or "not making a profit themselves" might be what they mean by "Uber-like", so it would just be an elaborate joke?