I have to disagree with anyone satisfied with
DI!! I have tried to be as quiet as I can but damn!!! They have great support, good server prices, but they are screwing me over big time.When I first got a server with them after a few months i took on a large traffic site and was using genbad and wusage, to keep an eye on them and noticed they moved traffic at about 120gig mon. for the whole server, 110 of it from the one site. DI charts said it the server moved at a rate of 290 gig. My ass, and they couldnt prove it, and they just kept saying thats what their router says but they could not say where the traffic came from. I dealt with it and paid the traffic for 290gig. I removed the site and a few others and the traffic went up to 330 gig for june, my ass!!! When i called to get the 411 on it i was told "As soon as i deleted the sites others moved in to take up the slack!"
No way, that exactly the same time i removed the site moving 120gig, there wasnt even a bump in the charts to show it. And Despite every tracking method i used I could not find the way to total 330 gig or even 250. I know they use 95th per. but where the hell is that grabbing the info from becuase i didnt use that. And in July I added one high traffic site , went ahead and paid the 330 gig worth and wham! Just when you think you'll live with 330 gig in freaking transfers, I got hit today with a bill for 656gig. I want to just scream profanities right now across the world about DI, but that really isn't going to help me , is it? Please fellow hosters, Advise me.

Oh My :(

I'm not sure what to say here....

I know what I want to say but its not approiate, If I were in your shoes i'd get out. They should produce router traffic graphs to account for every GB of those charges. Thats just plain wrong. Hell, Unless its one speced out server your load average would be through the roof pushing 600+ gb :(

Let me know if I can help.

Sincerely
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA~

Ya no ****, but they still want to rape me.
I would have had to move 22gig a day to get that rate and no doubt would never have the server up with that load!!! I want to yell out profanities but screw it, that wont help me right now. Im getting a leased line and doing things my own way. Then maybe for once there will be a host that doesnt try to rape the common man.

[This message has been edited by jaguar (edited 08-02-2000).]

This is also my biggest complaint with Dialtone. You just got rolled by their use of the 95% in calculating bandwidth.

My opinion, don't pay the extra bandwidth charge until they can account for it. Also, bring your contract to a Lawyer. Their contract is so flawed. One would think they could afford an attorney or if they have one find a competent one. They don't mention how much bandwidth you get per month, nor do they tell you how they calculate bandwidth, and they don't tell you how much extra bandwidth costs. You have to remember, this is their contract with you, they are bound by it as much as you are (if not more so since they wrote it).

Hi Daniel,

they do provide these graphs. They are on demand as well, therefore you can look at an updated MRTG graph whenever you want to track your bandwidth usage as often as you like.

I do admit that jaguar seems to have a problem here. I just don't know what the solution could be.

I haven't experienced any of these problems with DI, and my bandwidth usage for 40 + domains has consistently been less than 7 gb. My sites are obviously not high traffic, but I can't imagine using anywhere near 600 GB.



------------------
"I AM!"

Thanks scottlaw, you do bring up a nice point. They do have graphs but only the monthly grpah show the "95th percentile" and that only gets updated when they wanna bill you so all month long you go off the other two which never spiked up. I just saw the monthly and theres some crap on there about some huge spike, why do i have to pay an entire monthly rate for a one time or even 3 time spike when the rest of the month is so low. If you calculate the actuall percentage of traffic i use and bill 95th percent then it would look anything like their line at the top, looks like 100% of one days spike to me!

Sorry to jump in here, but I'm just wondering. What's the difference between hosts that calculate bandwidth using "95th percentile" and hosts that don't?

A friend of mine also has a server at Dialtone, and has mentioned being worried about how they measure bandwidth. After reading Jaguar's message, I can now see why he'd be a little concerned!

Hope your situation is resolved soon, Jaguar. Please post an update with anything that happens.

Jenn

Move to Catalog, .. or elsewhere. I am glad I did not join DI I considered it well and long but something has always touched my sense that it wouldn't be a good idea. Thanks for your input guys.

Ive contacted them and they will work on it, and get back with me. I'll keep you all informed. But i beleive ill just get my own t-1 setup.

Best of luck with that T1, do you mean a T1 @ dialtone or a T1 at your residence?..

Those can be quite expensive and you'll only get about 400-450 gb out of a T1 (450 is pushing it)




------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

Not at DI, how do you figure a 1.54mb connection not pushing more than 450g?
What connection would you recommend?

The router measures all traffic in/out from your server. So, you now have to take into consideration FTP and e-mail traffic, which wusage doesn't calculate and genbad calculates poorly.

However, I agree that 600+ GB per month is a bit much. Has your server been the victim of DDOS attacks or other bandwidth consuming attacks?

I believe that you can install your own "monitoring" application that will create it's own MRTG graph for each IP on your system. This would be one way of fighting the additional bandwidth fees.

Can someone tell me why DanielP said a T-1 wouldnt get me more than 400gig? I guess Im not quite understanding the concept. If you had 1.54mb connection and just absolutely filled (I realize you wouldnt want that) then you would move 1.5mb/sec * 60 sec. in a min. * 60 min. in an hour * 24hrs a day * 30 days amonth = pushes to about 4000gig not 400. Am I doing something wrong?

Originally posted by jaguar:
Can someone tell me why DanielP said a T-1 wouldnt get me more than 400gig? I guess Im not quite understanding the concept. If you had 1.54mb connection and just absolutely filled (I realize you wouldnt want that) then you would move 1.5mb/sec * 60 sec. in a min. * 60 min. in an hour * 24hrs a day * 30 days amonth = pushes to about 4000gig not 400. Am I doing something wrong?


The following is a very complex series of mathematics. Note that this is not my work - I am not this good at math :) This formula was worked out by a friend of mine, and I am re-posting it here for your enjoyment.

If you'd rather skip all the math, just scroll to the bottom and the conclusions are there.

The Math:

1,000,000 bits = 1 megabit

8 bits = 1 byte

1,048,576 bytes = 1 Megabyte
(220 is the closest power of 2 to one million, so that is how they came up with this number)

1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte

take:

1 byte / 8 bits * 1,000,000 bits / 1 megabit = 125,000 bytes / 1 megabit

125,000 bytes / 1 megabit * 1 megabyte / 1,048,576 Bytes = .119 megabytes / 1 megabit

The above two equations are zero-sum. In other words, because 1 byte = 8 bits, you could always cancel the whole thing out and call it zero. This means that even though it looks like I am dividing .119 megabytes by 1 megabit, I'm really saying they're equal because they could cancel each other out.

Here is where we bring time into the picture:

.119 megabytes / 1 second * 3600 seconds / 1 hour = 428.4 megabytes / hour

428.4 megabytes / hour * 24 hours / 1 day = 10281.6 megabytes / 1 day

10,281.6 megabytes / day * 1 gigabyte / 1024 megabytes = 10.04 GB / day

In other words, 1 megabit per second is 10.04 gigabytes per day. Because there are an uneven number of days in any given month, I'd just take this figure per megabit and multiply it by the number of megabits and the number of days. All this is is multiplying fractions with variables and cross canceling. It gets confusing because a "megabyte" represents "something." If you just handle it as an "x" that can be cancelled out by the same variable on the other side of a fraction or equation, it's easy.

End Math

Conclusion: 1 megabit per second is 10.04 GB per day. Therefore, 1.5 megabits per second is 15.06 GB per day.

Assuming an average 30-day month, then a 1.5 megabits per second T-1 line will process 451.8 GB per month if fully saturated.

Hopefully this is helpful. Note that in reality a T-1 line is actually 1.54 megabits per second, not 1.5 megabits per second - but since the math above computes to 1 megabit per second, you can apply the 10.04 GB per day per mbps to any amount you want and it should be correct.

Good luck,

Jason


------------------
Jason Ellis, CEO
Hosting Solutions, Inc.
www.windowswebhost.com (http://www.windowswebhost.com)
Now offering Fully Managed Servers!

[This message has been edited by Jason Ellis (edited 08-03-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Jason Ellis (edited 08-03-2000).]

I see, i was in the wrong mind set and had my numbers really wrong :) , man thats no good at all. I need much more than that.

jaguar,

Just remember... You were really not using over 600 GB. That was the highest spike after they took off the top 5%. I would be interested in looking at your monthly chart to see what you really used.

Scott


[This message has been edited by scottlaw (edited 08-04-2000).]

I agree with Scott, If your a hosting company then speak with someone @ vdi. Their bandwidth prices are pretty much out of this world (its a special, Bill the owner is quite happy with his new lines).

Or really VDI or probabbly any company hosted @ vdi such as InterServer.net UltraSpeedUSA.com Site5.com LiquidWeb.com and so forth.

But really you could be put on a full 100mbps line and just select a starting bandwidth and go from there if you wanted a full "burstable" ability to fill your NIC up.

Plus a T1 is going to cost you a good bit of money. It'd be great if we could see your graphs to figure your actual usage. MGTR normally gives an "average" usage in KB's. If you take that average and figure it into gb's then thats pretty close to your actual monthly bandwidth usage :).



------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

On a normal basis, the server hits almost exactly on 100k in peak hours and drops to about 15k in the pm during off peak hours. Its very consistant for the entire month( except for the whooping 656gig blast).
So I figure Im probably using around 200gig a month on actual transfers. Again thats just an estimate.

I'd guess much much less actually, ok lets say 100k peek and 15k off peek, how many hours each?

Sincerely
Daniel Pearson~

about 8hrs of 100k , 16hrs of 15k

Thanks DanielP for all the great help you've given me so far. Its a good feeling to find a place where hosts can discuss these issues.

[This message has been edited by jaguar (edited 08-05-2000).]

Ok Roughly if I did my math right (Note I never claimed to be perfect also I used a simpler 1k = 1000 vs 1024) just to keep it simple, if I made a mistake feel free to laugh because I was never good at conversions :)


2.88 GB = 8 hours
864 MB = 16 hours

For a total of roughly 3.8gb per day.

Or 115 Gig a month roughly.

Just to give u more figures to double check just incase I screwed up which I probabbly did somewhere :)

54 meg an hour off peek

360 meg an hour on peek.


Needless to say if my math is not completely flawed your no where near what their billing for.



------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

Using all the tools I have available to me Ive been testing things out and I total about 4.1 gig a day. I see all the stats and it totals them up for whatever period the servers been running so i restarted all services and checked it at the exact same time for several days and thats what each day totals. So You pretty damn close. Of course i have other servers too but none have this bandwidth problem (yet).

Jag,

your situation is a perfect example of how the 95th percentile system can screw you big time.

The fact that you have peaks of 100k for more than 36 hours in a month, means that you will pay that rate for the whole month. When I said the 95th percentile hasn't been unfair to me yet, that is because I don't have the extreme highs and lows that you do.

You should speak with someone at DI and figure something out. 600 GB does not equal your actual usage of approximately 120GB/months. That is completely unfair.

I wish you luck, and please let us know how it goes.

:)

Well they offer to cut me a "break" and take 20% off the 656gig charge just this one time.
But in the future im out on my own and will owe the full amount. I do appreciate their "break" but man im still getting royaly @ucked if you ask me. I have started looking into a fractional t-3 3mbps line and it looks promising. I will do more research, learn a lot more and hopefully go with it later this year or early next. Someone really needs to do something to bring all the good host together and have a place to list with 100% certanty when someone asks "Who is the best for dedicated or virtual hosting" . Maybe if all the host can pull together and work an alliance to by that major bandwidth and data center at cost with nobody trying to make a buck off them. That way the hosts can pass on the savings to the little guy and popular sites won't be asked to move all the time.
I would just like to see an alliance between real hosts (not resellers of hosts) come together. Any thoughts?

Originally posted by jaguar:
Maybe if all the host can pull together and work an alliance to by that major bandwidth and data center at cost with nobody trying to make a buck off them.

Not to be a pessimist Jag, but I've got 100:1 odds it never happens. Putting together a good data center takes a massive amount of money, and I don't see anyone coming out of the woodwork to front that kind of money without getting something in return.

We're talking $70k per router, $2000 per switch/rack, plus rental space, and staff. Let's assume the operating costs of the location are... $550k/setup (that includes 2 redundant routers, $300k for fire supressant [yes, it really does cost that much, unless you want water, which is not good], $25k for raised floors, $85k for miscellaneous -- generator, electricity, security, AC). Now, lets move to monthly fees. Put down at least another $115k/mo on staff ($100k technical staff, assumes 3 "upper level" techs, proficient in networking/systems, and 20 medium levelers (think 8 hour shifts, 24/7 here...), $15k non-tech support [security, shipping clerks, etc]). Dump another $10k/mo on real estate rental. Another $10k/mo on electricity (air conditioning and computers use lots).

Next, let's look at bandwidth -- let's assume you want 3 DS3's. You can expect the "median price", to be ~$23k/mo. Loopbacks on a DS3 can easily run $4k, so, you're looking at around $27k/mo for the bandwidth. You'll be paying at 100th percentile, too, so, since we're doing it at cost, let's pass that on to the customers: $2/mo at 100th percentile.

Total cost:

Setup: $550k
Monthly: $216k

Likelihood of that happening without profit as a goal: Pigs will fly out of hell (cause they don't like places that freeze over) before this ever happens.

Also, ironically, you're really not a whole lot better off at this point, since you're paying at 100th percentile as a hosting customer, and there is probably no free technical support, either :)

Mind you, these are just "raw" estimates, I didn't actually go out and get a bunch of quotes -- I used ones I've seen in the past, and the costs may vary by +/- 20%, depending on where in the States you put it :)

Correction: $27k/mo PER DS3. Oops.

Well just keep on running there... :)
You forget that its not impossible to do.
Obviously all the other thousands of NOC's in the world started somehow! And yes, I do have willing investors but I do need more. Whats the difference between all the hosts paying for all those technicians,fees, and support without sending some extra cash to the company to put away in some daddy warbucks fund :) , and paying the ones today to thicken thier pockets. All you do is set a charter and board members to figure out staffing and pay for the staff to include any raises, more or less a non-profit NOC. There are many non-profit org. out there too that have to pay staffs, supplies, and much more and at the rate of millions of dollars, not just a few hundred thou. Oh Im not talking about building a huge monster NOC that will just blow away all the others or even match them. All you need is a state of the art NOC to hold as much folks as you (the hosts of the charter) need to hold with some room for growth. When you need to increase team size, facility, or any other parts... you do it. The SBA, wells fargo, and of course investors will always help out a good thing! I didnt say Im rushing out to do it but it would be a nice thing to see. Also any member of that charter would have to prove itself its worthy of the services, we dont want a bunch of truehosting's using it.

jaguar,

A course or two (or book) in economics could be very helpful. The idea of a not-for-profit NOC is highly impractical. Profit is what pays for capital improvements (and virtually all other expenses). In any communications field, it costs fortunes. Considering how fast things change, profit is needed just to not falll behind.

What incentive would there be for investors in a not-for-profit organization? Frankly, without profit for capital improvements and keeping up with technologies, any such NOC is doomed to failure, even assuming it could get started in the first place.

There are major changes being planned for the infrastructure of the Internet. We won't recognize the Internet of the next decade with what we've seen up to now. Profit will be needed to stay abreast of those and more moderate changes. Remember, the state of the art is a dynamic, rather than static, state. It is constantly changing.

Ok, your right about the non-progit part.
I got a qoute for a full DS-3 for $12k

[This message has been edited by jaguar (edited 08-06-2000).]

$12,000 for a full DS-3?

If so that's amazing, it's about time bandwidth prices came down, how else are we gonna progress with richer content.

I'm interested in knowing what company provided you with that quote? Is it a reputable company?

(in the UK $12,000 a month would buy you a 1mbps, sigh)

I believe Globix is the one who quotes full 45mbps DS3's at around 12,000 or so, but lets not forget the local loop charges which can be 4000-7000 depending on location.



------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

The qoute was from Qwest , but your right you still need the loop and its $4k a mo. but thats still a good healthy drop in prices

Originally posted by Duster:
A course or two (or book) in economics could be very helpful. The idea of a not-for-profit NOC is highly impractical. Profit is what pays for capital improvements (and virtually all other expenses).
I agree with your basic point: that the idea is impractical because you have no incentive for investors if you're not going to turn a profit. But, for clarity's sake, "profit" is not what pays for capital improvements and other expenses. Those are... well, expenses. Capital improvements are an expense, and would be a legitimate expense for a nonprofit organization. Profit is generally paid to investors/stockholders in the form of dividends. When an actual nonprofit organization has money left over at the end of the fiscal period it becomes "retained earnings." It could certainly then be spent on capital improvements, or any other such expense.

Originally posted by Admin:
$12,000 for a full DS-3?

With Qwest. :) I've not heard more good things than bad about them -- ie, they've got a decent foundation, but their engineers kinda suck. I don't have any first hand knowledge, but most of this comes from people I trust.

Still, I have two comments on that:

A. $12k/mo is probably their "market penetration" cost. That means that they'll give you that cost until they've penetrated the market enough to compete with the big boys and demand free peering with them, then raise the prices. I don't know that for a fact, but it's my guess. Most established companies don't charge any less than $20k/mo for bandwidth.

B. Okay, let's assume that it's $12k/mo forever. That still only helps you with Qwest -- one provider doesn't cut it, if you're a serious bandwidth provider. I know UUNet (as of 2 months ago) charged ~$19k for 15Mbit. I don't know about Sprint, PSI, BBN, etc -- and UUNet, Sprint, PSI, BBN, and AT&T are the guys you _really_ want, since they have good connectivity to everyone. Unless you want to go with someone like InterNAP -- who is probably the best, if all you want is one provider, with excellent conectivity. They pull in lines from UUNet, Sprint, PSI, BBN, Verio, AT&T, etc to a "PNAP" in each major city, you connect to the PNAP, and get connectivity to those guys. They're pretty expensive though.

*shrug* 1 DS3 does not a good network make. :) IMO, 1 DS3 makes a _bad_ network :) Especially if it's from a new, unproven company like Qwest.

Nikkoru,

We agree, so there's not much to say, except that you are just delving into semantics. It doesnt matter what you call it, but if you sell sopmething for one price and pay a lesser price for it, that difference is what pays the bills, pure and simple.

After paying all bills and normal operating expenses, you can call it net profit or retained earnings, piggy bank fund :-D or anything you like, it is still profit.

If you don't pay out any of it to shareholders, there is no reason for most to put any money in in the first place. If you don't make a profit (regardless if the corp. is not-for profit or not), you have greater concerns than what to call what you're not making. However, if you do make it, you can call it whatever you want to.

I once worked at a business that said I could name my own salary. Mine was named Fred.


[This message has been edited by Duster (edited 08-07-2000).]

Now thats Funny :)