Urgent, bandwidth costs!!
 

my bill last month from my server company was an extra $542.00

I went over due to hotlinking from asian sites.

at $25 per mbit bandwidth overage my increased bill was 21.7 x 25 = $542.00

what should I be paying?

thanks I need to figure out what to do about this.:helpme

turn hotlink protection on :2 cents:

Not sure what you are asking here.....you are wondering if the BW prices are too high or?

$25/mbps is fine if it's 2003

http://www.choopa.com/unmetered_servers/

$5 to $7 is the going rate and much less for the big boys doing Gbits

:2 cents::thumbsup

also get a list of ip ranges from parasite asian countries and ban them in htaccess.

Depends on how much bandwidth you are currently consuming.

To give you an idea: entry level at webair was for me: $70 per mbit overage.
At techiemedia, I get $12 per mbit.

debbieN...sorry to hear!!! $25/Mbps overage is too much! Hit your provider up! Hopefully they will work with you! If they don't, it might be time to start looking for alternatives! :2 cents:

thanks, the hotlinking protection was turned on and the thieves were stopped.

bandwidth is somewhat confusing to me.

my cpanel said that I used 2968 gigs in august and in sept (last bill) I used 3643 gigs. a month change of 675 gigs. I am not sure were the 26.7 mbit overage came from.

I sent a request in for the difference and will get an answer back shortly.

email:

Last 30 days usage (Metered 95%): 41754.67 kb/sec
Overage 26.7mbits
Courtesy 5 Mbits Credit
Total Overage Charge 21.7mbits @$25mbit $542.50 USD


I hate moving things around. this is why I waited, again to change services.

once the hotlinking was stopped my daily bandwidth on my busiest domain dropped from 250 GB back down to 35 GB on a daily basis.

damn hotlinking should have been turned on a long time ago.

:(

probably because you're on 95th percentile is where the overage came from

If I am paying for managed servers is it wrong for me to expect them to keep track of HUGE spikes in bandwidth usage?

I looked back all the way to January and the hotlinking was going on then.

damn, I wish this would have been fixed a year ago.

It's your responsibility to watch your own BW stats and if you see somethin g starting to go wrong or not seeming right then get the host to see whats up before the spike effects your bills 95th %. Also for the amount of BW you are using you are paying to much.

i've been through all of that just that in my case it was $2000

basic line: you are responsible for your traffic and this shitty 95% percentile must be something hosts invented to get rich cause it does not reflect the actual amount of data transferred.

and you should be paying something between $10 and $15 per mbit - significantly less than $10 usually requires a commitment like 50 or 100 mbit per month

what is the 95% percentile?

anyone have a clue.

I just asked my server company and they should get right back to me.

It can be purchased super cheap, you can also buy higher quality bw from companies that also provide superior support;

It would be the number 1 reason I would say to hit up jim over at www.techiemedia.net
Forget looking at the listed prices, just tell them your current deal and usage, then see if they are willing to go near it.
Honestly they are worth every penny.

95% percentile takes the 5 highest spikes from your MRTG graph and averages them to determine your bandwidth usage.

got porn, thanks

good article.

Techie Media will provide you with a link to MRTG reports. You can check your 95% number anytime you want. I check several times a day. The report gives you daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. It is updated every 5 minutes and if you see a spike that you don't understand - open a support task and ask. If it is really bad, make it an urgent task and a tech will be on it in a matter of minutes.

Another thought - you could look into ThrottleBox - https://www.bettercgi.com/throttlebox/

Actually, it chops the top 5% of 5 minute transfer averages off in a given time period. The highest remaining transfer number is what you get charged for. (Thats the way it works for Cacti - a better program than MRTG)

I used to run a hosting company a few years back. It was very useful way to bill clients who had bursty traffic. I had to buy a specified capacity, and if the clients wanted to be able to burst, I had to make it available for them.

These days, with bandwidth nearly free, I dont know if it makes as much sense.

Hi Debbie, Feel free to contact me when you get the chance. I can give you some ideas how to make it so this doesn't happen again...

Also, if you are looking for better pricing, we have some of the most aggressive BW prices in the industry:

[email protected] or ICQ: 412-203-056

Switch to Webair!! I get crazy low overage charges!!

Choopa is a great provider, and their bandwidth pricing is extremely competitive if you need unmetered service.

Drop Andy a line.

It's best to go unmetered if you have any amount of real traffic. 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps. Paying for overage charges that are ten times the actual cost of the bandwidth is insane.

What you are paying for is capacity, not the transfer amount. In order to have fast speeds, you need constantly availability unlimited capacity, thats what 95th percentile is billing for.
The amount of transfer you can do per amount of capacity (1Mbps) varies by each customer/server/website so is not a good way to plan network usage on the whole. You plan by the available capacity which is needed, and you bill that way too.

:2 cents:

As many have already stated you are paying to much, but I agree that it is your responsibility to watch your BW usage yourself. In any case if you want to improve the overall quality of your hosting you really should talk to the peeps at Techiemedia the prices are fair and the support is 2nd to none.:thumbsup

1. YOU ARE PAYING WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOUR BANDWIDTH
2. that thing with hotlinking is an old news
3. it's easy to stop it, just outsource some good admin to fix that up
4. check how much bw you consume at least 1 time /week

we are hosted with www.caro.net
check them out for hq servers + bw and still low price

dedico.com, I get charged $8/mbps for overages and pay alot less for my monthly commitment, highly recommended them. Hit em up for a hella deal!

buy 30mbps for $269

Everyone that hasn't already......

Please e-mail your host (not icq or aim) so you have written record the following.

I'm saving everyone the time & work here, just copy/paste your name/company at the end of it.

"Hello my name is (__NAME HERE__). I am a current dedicated server client. I would like to be notified in the future via e-mail (or phone) at (_EMAIL HERE_) / (_PHONE # HERE_) if my server/server's go (__NAME A % HERE__) or more above my monthly allotted bandwidth amount. Do you offer services to monitor large b/w increases on customer's servers, and if not, can you set something like that up on my server?

Thank you
__YOUR NAME & COMPANY___"


Optional information you can add after the last sentence, for those running free image hosting sites/video hosting sites etc, that actually benefit from hot linking on social networks etc...This will alleviate their most frequent reply/offer which is to install anti-hotlinking software on your site.

I am not looking to ban hot linking of my content because that is actually part of my business model. I am simply looking to be notified if I get hit by a forum (especially in asia) for a large spike in bandwidth. So that I can decide wether or not I want to ban this site from hot linking (on an individual basis) in the future.

Or

I am not looking to ban hot linking of my content because that is actually part of my business model. Do you have a system in place to automatically ban foreign forums that burn more than (__# HERE__) mbps per day. If not, can you have this set up as a cron-job in relation to/or pulling from my site statistics?

That really all depends upon how your host and you define Managed Hosting. IMHO if you are paying for a fully managed service then your host's support should be taking an active roll in the performance of your server and what it is doing. Sadly many hosts today use the term Managed very loosely and only react when you send up a red flag or submit a request to them, which to me is really only semi-managed at best.

Certainly you should monitor what your server is doing, never less than weekly, and the busier that it is the more often you should be looking at your stats. Choosing a host that provides you with the same BW tools that they will bill by is critical, that way you can see exactly the same thing they are determining your billing based upon. While Cpanel and other CPs on the market may give you close estimations of your BW utilization you should never rely on them completely as they are not intended to measure all of the traffic in and out of your server.

If you decide to do a little host hunting hit me up about what Caro.Net can offer you and in the meantime good luck!

Hi,

Your host should of warned you that you were going way over your committed b/w rate. We inform all our customers who are going way over there committed rate in bandwidth. Are you managed? If so it should be up to your host to setup hotlink protection for you once they notice a bandwidth increase.

Also if you bought your server & have say 20mbps included, you simply ask your host to cap it at 25mbps max, & to notify you in the event it does go over 20mbps for a certain % of sustained time. (in days, not hours....everyone's site will at some point burst past 20mbps at some point for a few hours, but it should not effect your monthly allotted usage).

I suggest you just hit up your host with my message though. And see what they can offer you. Even if you move to another hosting company, this should be one of the very first e-mails you send.

Turn on anti-hotlinking. :upsidedow:2 cents:

That's a great idea for some people. But for those with watermarked content, or anyone with a different type of "business model" that could end up in losing a ton of free traffic/referred customers.

Everyone should e-mail their host with the information i posted above & find out what their policies are & what their specific options are (since they are different at almost every hosting company)

Looking at it really really simply, if your "spike" covers more than 5% of the month (more than about 36 hours - doesn't need to be in sequence either) then you'll be billed at the "spike rate" rather than your lower average rate.

Put your mind at ease and simply move ouer and up to Techiemedia. Jim and his crew will take very good care of you. their prices are competitive but their support is in a class of their own and the best in the biz.:2 cents::thumbsup

I seriously think you should consider giving http://www.dedicatednow.com a try if things don't turn out well for you at you host now.

and this is why i think the 95% percentile is a scam. :2 cents:

95th % is pretty standard industry and is how most hosts get billed by their providers.:2 cents:

i know - but that does not change my opinion. but i had to learn to live with it

Thanks to this post, I just renegotiated my bw costs saving me a few hundred a month! Steak supper for the family this weekend methinks!

Throttlebox might help too.

NO, I has same issue a year ago, and I learned the best is to redirect the traffic to a geo-targetted landing page. i am making free money with this method since i am enlightened.

One of my box's just got smacked last night from Asian forums. Ahhh the joys of running a free image host.

Seriously though, EVERYONE here should be taking the pre-done e-mail template i provided earlier in this post & using it.

Now back to work....no more time to post on gfy.

Madness foo.