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Overselling Bandwidth and Real Life Use Stats
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Overselling Bandwidth and Real Life Use Stats

randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

Hello all.

Since there are a lot of providers lurking on this forum, I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to share how much they oversell there bandwidth? Or more important, how much less bandwidth do your clients use compared to what you actually offer?

Seems to be most people don't use half as much bandwidth they THINK they need, let alone what most providers offer. Some providers offer insane amount of bandwidth, cheaper than what wholesale IP transit would ordinarily cost, so it would seem likely that most, if not all providers oversell. But how many clients really use what this capacity?

I am especially interested in figures for low end VPS (in the 1GB - 8GB RAM range).

Comments

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited August 2016

    40-50TB of bandwidth is allocated (for VMs) on a typical 32GB system, monthly usage never goes above 5TB-10TB, sometimes around 15TB but rare.

    Or are you asking about consistent port usage?

    Edit: Most of my clients don't run applications that require lots of bandwidth, just web servers, voice servers, or development use.

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

    MikeA said: Or are you asking about consistent port usage?

    Im mainly thinking about consistent port usage. Which brings me to the next question. Of your 5-10TB and sometimes 15TB, how constant is your bandwidth usage? Is it fairly even over the month or do you end up with some very short bursts at very high speeds?

    MikeA said: Edit: Most of my clients don't run applications that require lots of bandwidth, just web servers, voice servers, or development use.

    Can't imagine why anyone really needs that much traffic. Unless you are running a VPN, torrenting or serving copyrigh material, realistically what kind of servers need so much bandwidth?

  • randvegeta said: realistically what kind of servers need so much bandwidth?

    Web crawlers. Ask HarryCross or Juan

    Thanked by 1lifehome
  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited August 2016

    @randvegeta said:

    MikeA said: Or are you asking about consistent port usage?

    Im mainly thinking about consistent port usage. Which brings me to the next question. Of your 5-10TB and sometimes 15TB, how constant is your bandwidth usage? Is it fairly even over the month or do you end up with some very short bursts at very high speeds?

    MikeA said: Edit: Most of my clients don't run applications that require lots of bandwidth, just web servers, voice servers, or development use.

    Can't imagine why anyone really needs that much traffic. Unless you are running a VPN, torrenting or serving copyrigh material, realistically what kind of servers need so much bandwidth?

    Most of them show around 10Mbps - 50Mbps throughout the day. Obviously it is low for overnight hours for the respective region, bursts are rare for outgoing traffic (excl. automated backups) but it's not a big deal for me anyways. Some of them are used for things like VPNs, but not much, I was just giving a broad guess.

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    randvegeta said: how much less bandwidth do your clients use compared to what you actually offer?

    On average clients use about 2% of allocated bandwidth.

  • ManofServerManofServer Member
    edited August 2016

    @randvegeta said:
    Can't imagine why anyone really needs that much traffic. Unless you are running a VPN, torrenting or serving copyrigh material, realistically what kind of servers need so much bandwidth?

    It depends, high traffic websites can consume 2-5 TB of data per month - we're talking about a text/graphics-based website, not an audio/video based website, so those could use up even more.

    Even if you have an indie video maker that gets like 1,000-10,000 viewers a month, it's still going to use over 10TB.

    Edit: Luckily high traffic sites are rare :D

  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    @AnthonySmith said:

    randvegeta said: how much less bandwidth do your clients use compared to what you actually offer?

    On average clients use about 2% of allocated bandwidth.

    In our analysis for dedicated server customers who are not hosting companies usage above 10 percent os very rare.

    Hosting companies generally use pretty close to their allotment, and sometimes more.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @jbiloh said:

    @AnthonySmith said:

    randvegeta said: how much less bandwidth do your clients use compared to what you actually offer?

    On average clients use about 2% of allocated bandwidth.

    In our analysis for dedicated server customers who are not hosting companies usage above 10 percent os very rare.

    Hosting companies generally use pretty close to their allotment, and sometimes more.

    That sounds pretty accurate.

    I knew someone a long time ago that used to sell colocation and he always loved the people that wouldn't buy past the default since that meant they were likely never going to hit their limit short of being compromised or otherwise. He wasn't a big fan of people that would come in and pick up 100mbit/sec on a single 1U since they were likely to burn it up.

    Hosting customers can be a loaded gun if they're not auto suspending their customers. For a while there SolusVM had completely broken BW accounting (rate limiting & accounting) and there was more than a few hosts that got fairly big overages.

    Francisco

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    @Francisco said:

    @jbiloh said:

    @AnthonySmith said:

    randvegeta said: how much less bandwidth do your clients use compared to what you actually offer?

    On average clients use about 2% of allocated bandwidth.

    In our analysis for dedicated server customers who are not hosting companies usage above 10 percent os very rare.

    Hosting companies generally use pretty close to their allotment, and sometimes more.

    That sounds pretty accurate.

    I knew someone a long time ago that used to sell colocation and he always loved the people that wouldn't buy past the default since that meant they were likely never going to hit their limit short of being compromised or otherwise. He wasn't a big fan of people that would come in and pick up 100mbit/sec on a single 1U since they were likely to burn it up.

    Hosting customers can be a loaded gun if they're not auto suspending their customers. For a while there SolusVM had completely broken BW accounting (rate limiting & accounting) and there was more than a few hosts that got fairly big overages.

    Francisco

    Oh no, there's still some broken parts..

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @MikeA said:
    Oh no, there's still some broken parts..

    Is that a question or a statement? :P

    Francisco

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    @Francisco said:

    @MikeA said:
    Oh no, there's still some broken parts..

    Is that a question or a statement? :P

    Francisco

    Statement. A past version upgrade (it seems) messed up some RAM allocation counting for KVM and I've had some recent issues with it counting "yuuugee" amounts of bandwidth on a VM that's not using over 100kbit.

    Just my luck, though I've neglected to look around and find a solution. Maybe I'll do that now.

  • PrColoPrColo Member
    edited August 2016

    We advertise 30tb on single units monthly. It just so happens that most clients only use about 5% of that.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited August 2016

    If you sell high bandwidth plans they have a higher chance of being used. If you sell low bandwidth plans, oversell until you think it's just hilarious. The trick is that the bandwidth offered cannot attract anyone close to the "unmetered" crowd. Anyone who's ears perk up at that word, you don't want to appeal to if you're relying heavily on people not using what they buy.

    Same goes for storage. You could sell so much more in 15GB increments than you could in 1TB increments. Because someone buying 1TB of storage is looking for backup or torrent storage, and someone buying 15GB of storage has no need for high storage.

    It's all about playing it smart.

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    For dedicated, yeah I imagine it's higher, for a vps company not using high bandwidth as a selling point it is much lower, in my case over 6 years it's about 2%, that has risen from about 1% in recent years.

  • Generally don't have a problem w/ bandwidth, all depends on your clientele I guess.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited August 2016

    We started this business on the leftovers of the main one. Because streaming by definition requires huge spare capacity to cope with suddenly popular shows, we ended up with a lot to spare and it was all a question of prioritizing it in order to cope with peaks.
    Also, there is the commitment and the 5 percentile. Out of the COMMITTED traffic we usually use some 10%.

    Thanked by 1vimalware
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