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Understanding colo bandwidth costs
Hi - I'm trying to better understand how colo bandwidth costs are calculated and there seem to be several different ways in which this is done. Some providers say that they will provide 100 Mbps burstable with an overage rate of (say) $0.1 per GB. Others specify 5Mbps burstable to 100 Mbps with overage costs in terms of $1 per Mbps. I haven't really found a clear explanation of these calculations and I haven't actually gotten a straight answer from providers either! As always, I look to this community to get some advise on what this means and what are the kinds of questions one should ask providers?
Thanks!
Comments
Every 5 minutes, the host is going to take a sample of your bandwidth usage. Let's say that there are 43,200 minutes in a month, so that's 8,640 checks. And let's say you use 100 Mbps average during those five minutes most of the time. However, every so often you burst to 250 Mbps, figure for 640 of those checks. The remaining 8,000 are all 100 Mbps.
The host is going to drop the top 5% of usage or 432 checks. Then they're going to add the remaining ones and calculate the average. That's your usage for the month.
So, in the above case, we'd drop 432 of your 250 Mbps checks. You'd have 640 - 432 = 208 x 250 Mbps checks and 8,000 x 100 Mbps checks.
(208 * 250 + 8,000 * 100)/(8,640 - 432) = 103.80117 Mbps
If you got 100 Mbps on a GigE with overages billed at $1 per Mbps, you'd pay an extra $4 that month.
Wikipedia article on the topic.
Thank you very much, Steven. This makes sense and is line with other explanations I have seen online. What confused me was a quote that I got from a provider for 100Mbps Burstable Bandwidth with $0.05 / gb overage. I'm not sure what to make of the $0.05 /gb overage cost? When I asked for an explanation, I got an email that said something like "100Mbps burstable is equivalent to 30TB bandwidth".
This explanation is not correct.
Your usage would be 250Mbps in your example.
qps - your interpretation of this example is in line with this example here: https://www.ntsource.com/web-hosting/bandwidth-example.html. So, for a provider with low transfer needs, the 95 percentile method may not end up being a good solution?
It really depends on your usage pattern. If you have pretty consistent usage patterns and don't have a lot of uneven usage, 95th percentile works fine.
95th percentile is the industry standard way of billing for IP transit providers. This means that regardless of the method you are being billed by your colo provider, the colo provider is paying based on your 95th percentile usage. If your usage is very uneven, your provider may not tolerate billing you by another method for very long if you are costing them money compared to what you are paying, especially once your usage starts getting to be significant.
Yes, that makes sense and it seems to be the standard way of calculating usage patterns.
Although, I am still confused by this quote from a provider (sorry for repeating the question): 100Mbps Burstable Bandwidth with $0.05 / gb overage. I'm not sure what to make of the $0.05 /gb overage cost? When I asked for an explanation, I got an email that said something like "100Mbps burstable is equivalent to 30TB bandwidth".
1mbps flat out for a month will move roughly 300GB of data.
So 10mbps flat lined will do about 3TB
100mbps 30Tb etc.
nlt sure about bursting but to transfer 30TB in a month would need you to max out the 100mbps for the full month
you get 30tb then $0.05 per gb thereafter