Hello,

I am with Alabanza, our server has about 200gig of traffic each month (our http://www.lik-sang.com is the expensive thing).

We are paying US$ 6 for each gigabyte, if we are buying in blocks of 25gig. Below it is US$ 10.

How much are you paying ?

-Alex

Your site looks good :)

Can you please tell me how your bandwidth is actually measured? Where is it measured and what is measured? Is it the total of all in and out data transfer or just outbound data (leaving your server) which is charged. Thanks.

$6/GB is rediculous. Unless your server is located in London or some similarly distant location you should not be paying such rates.
Most dedicated servers buy bandwidth at between $1.50 and $3.00 per GB (of total IP bandwidth, that is); prices for virtual hosting vary more (given the practice of charging a fixed rate for any usage up to a preset limit) but I still think it should end up significantly lower than $6/GB (of application bandwidth, ie http bytes_transferred).

Ah, you run the famous hardware site. GBA kit sales must be good :)

Other than that, $6 per gig is a lot of money. It should be anywhere from $2 - $4, depending on how much you buy.

Alex!

Get rid! You're being taken for a ride here!

Even in the UK you wouldnt pay that much for 200GB bandwidth / month!

Over here you could get that much for about $ 600 / month ( not inc. server ) so in the US you should be getting it for half that !

Nice site by the way, well bookmarked ;)


Cheers,

cool Alex, i'm using your affiliate program through cj.com on my forums and sites - i.e. http://animeboards.com :D

really standard bandwidth should be no more than US$3/GB

you're paying too much (had to say it again even though it has been said already :) ) and should move hosts

btw, have you tried installing mod_gzip on such a site? compress those pages by 33 - 90% in size :D i went from 150GB/month to 100GB/month from compression :)

Where can I download this compressions program? I have a site 250,000 page views a month soon moving a dedicated server and needs to be using the lease amount of bandwith.

antitrack

With Dialtone Internet we negotiated a good deal on additional traffic. You can negotiate that down with your provider Alabanza, if they want to keep you happy.

Romero

Originally posted by Furton
Where can I download this compressions program? I have a site 250,000 page views a month soon moving a dedicated server and needs to be using the lease amount of bandwith. mod_gzip ? i put up a how to install article for mod_gzip on my site at http://www.i4net.tv/marticle/get.php?action=getarticle&articleid=12

enjoy :)

I agree with romero; $6 a gig is too much extra bandwidth. You should be able to get a better deal since you are pushing over 200GBs a month. Give alabanza a call and see if you could renegotiate with them (maybe ask them for the pricing on a 1 megabit line? (~320 GB)).

complain to customer service and demand for some of your money back and that they are cheating you

I don't think you are being 'cheated'... if that's what they charge, that's what they charge. I agree that is a lot to pay for bandwidth, but accusing a host a cheating him isn't right. They will probably negotiate with you on future prices, but I highly doubt they will refund anything.

hi all,

thanks for your help.

eva2000, thanks about the hint with mod_gzip. i did not knew it, everything i knew was ob_gzhandler of PHP, but people warned us, php has still some bugs with it.

is mod_gzip really stable right now with the most browsers ?

I've asked them for a better deal already, but seems thats their final deal :/

The guy there is at holiday right now, I'll have to wait for his return to discuss further.

I'll also research where the actual high traffic comes from, if it is from the images, I am thinking about hosting at least the images with another host, but still keep a mirror at alabanza, in case something happens.

We really had bad experience with Communitech when our site (virtual host) went down (mysql tables went corrupt) and they told us for 2 weeks at xmas last year they don't know how to fix it, instead of offering us a real solution. We even offred a lot of money to them and we were offering moving to a dedicated server. At that time we had just a bit of traffic, not much...

Alex

i forgot to mention that we are paying US$6 for each additional GB after the 50GB which are included in our package.

They are a large web host, they have plenty of people willing to pay them $6/GIG, so they will be very unlikely to cut you a deal. In fact, most large web hosts still charge too much, because they have larger client's and new client's signing up all the time, they don't need to drop their prices because of that. However, some of us know better. Heck, even we offer virtual hosting bandwidth overage at $3/GIG and a lot of hosts I've seen out there offering collocation and dedicated, are asking (as you can see) twice that. It just doesn't make any sense, it's like these people need to desperately catch up on the times.

And, yes, mod_gzip is stable, I'm not aware of any issues with it. It's definitely worth having if you have any text, HTML, CGI or PHP, etc. type of files/pages.

We are paying between $2-4 per gb.

I don't think it is true in this case, but with bandwidth you get what you pay for. If you are paying something like $1.00-$2.00/GB it is "probably" not very good bandwidth.

There is such a thing as good/bad bandwidth.

Please, no flames :)

Originally posted by RackMy.com
I don't think it is true in this case, but with bandwidth you get what you pay for. If you are paying something like $1.00-$2.00/GB it is "probably" not very good bandwidth.

There is such a thing as good/bad bandwidth.

Please, no flames :)

This is certainly true or a lot of hosts. However, that's true and not always based on the price you are charged that makes the difference. Cheaper is not always a good idea, and more expensive is not always the best idea either. It really depends. What you said it true, but it depends on what provider. Also, it (the price and the price that can be passed down to you) is not always the quality of the upstream/connection, but how much a host can afford to buy (in bulk). This lowers prices with the great backbone provider's as well. The bigger the lines, the cheaper you can offer bandwidth, not just because it's cheap bandwidth. I too often wonder about the $1.00 a GIG or less deals.
However, some people do have a large enough client base to be able to buy such large amounts of bandwidth, or have such large lines due to this revenue, that they literally can give the same quality bandwidth other hosts/NOC's do for far less. Again, it depends on why they are getting it for cheap enough to pass it along though. It's reasonable to assume that some hosts that have the $1 to $2/ GIG prices are not scams and are not just getting bad/cheap quality bandwidth. Therefore, I wouldn't say it's "probably not good bandwidth", I'd be incline to add something like "with most hosts, it's probably.... ... but it depends on a few variables".

$6 Bucks a gig seems really high.. 2-4 would sound about right to me but $6 is cutting it i think.