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Company trying to charge me over bandwidth use of months back?
So I have been a customer with certain company for +5 years, today, they have detected my dedicated server have used more bandwidth than hired (10tb) and they created an invoice of +$200 to pay for the months I have overused bandwidth.
I understand to pay this month overuse (the limit is 10tb but they have cut my server when I reached 35tb), well actually I don't, they should have limited my server bandwith once I reached 10TB instead of letting it run, but charging me months back of something their system should have noticed or done?
is this fair/normal?
Comments
Normally nothing is normal.
I read TOS/Fair usage policy, there is nothing about that.
amazon does it!
don't believe me? ask Jeff Bezos's penis.
Normal and fair. Expecting them to cut you when you are over 10TB? Doesn't happen in this biz.
I am not complaing for cutting me once I reach 10TB, of course that is normal and fair, I am talking about charging me for months back when they have not noticed of the overbandwidth and where is nothing stated in their ToS or Fair Usage Policy -and of course, I did not even know as their panel does not have a bandwidth control-
Probably depends on your contract/their tos and which country you're/the hoster is from.
Here in germany it is possible, and legitimate.
Still fair, I would say. When you deal with business invoices/contracts, errors can happen and you can be charged/credited for invoices going back to 6 months in my experience.
If you actually went over the limit (and I see no reason for them to lie), then yes. You should be paying for the bandwidth you used regardless of how long it has been.
Is it fair? Yes. Normal? No. You'd usually be told that you went over the limit promptly instead of months later. But read the terms and make a decision yourself if it is warranted or not.
I worry about bandwidth charges literally all the time except for ovh/hetzner servers. Not surprised at all.
At least OP sounds calm and logical.
There was one guy some months ago who panic-posted here for being overcharged 600 euro (which turned out to be a mistake on host's part) for bandwidth overusage.
He was crying out that his parents would lock him up and ground him from the internet or something.
Did you received any warning?
Is there any way to check the bandwidth usage of your server? (confirm this by ticket to them)
No, I did not. And no, I can't check bandwidth usage unfortunatly. Basically is a dedicated server managed and they saw a lot of traffic this month because my friend is taken over my company so I assume they must have seen I am leaving and they are doing this.
Thing is there is nothing in their ToS regarding this, for example @Jack has it on its ToS so I would have known but if it isn't in their ToS, how would I even know?
Sue'em.
Who's the host anyway?
ask them to spread it over 12 months or just cancel and let them go legal and defend it.
So after mentioning them there wasn't in their ToS they will just make me pay last 3 months, I would have gone further but being honest I just want my sites to be back online as they did not even limited the bandwidth they just shut the server down.. as if that was fair
Upgrade - you're clearly using more bandwidth than you expect.
Could also ask for them to suspend next time if you go over the limit, just to be safe (if they offer that).
In before OP's another thread about his server being down due to bandwidth over usage.
Just noticed he said "my customers" lol. Yeah don't ask for them to suspend lmao
Always monitor your own bandwidth. I've seen errors in bandwidth reporting before and contested overages and got them waved before. I've also caught myself before overages occurred and saved myself some money because of a $2/month VPS running Observium.
No back'ups?
Yes, I store daily backups on external server but due to server having a lot of IOwait and every time backups ran it went down last backup was from 1 week ago
Thanks for the recommendation, never heard of Obvervium but def installing in!
Them not providing any way to verify and or warning about bandwidth usage...i would change provider.
You went over the quota and they charged you. Read the fine print.
35TB that's like 100% continuous 24/7 usage of 100Mbps link in one way for one month straight, let's say download. It's quite expected to pay something for that pipe.
His limit was 10TB according to his post.
35TB seems like negligence to me. 200 bucks is a cheap lesson for this though.
Given that it's a managed server and it seems that he has no chance to monitor traffic or install a software to monitor traffic it is at least bad behaviour of the provider.
In the end you caused the traffic and you should pay for it but you want to discuss with your provider how they can help you to avoid that in the future.
On a related note, is it possible for you to name said company? I find it a little odd that they "didn't notice" more than triple the allocated bandwidth being used (and a port being hogged 24/7).
Plot twist: Basement server.
That is one resilient 5+ year basement server