I am thinking of moving servers from our colocation company to another colocation company both of whom are located within the same building.

Currently we are buying 10gb of data transfer per month on a burstable 100mb/s network. The new provider measures his data transfer slightly more differently:

"For a burstable PAYG feed, measured using the 95th percentile method, you are charged the higher of incoming or outgoing data, but not both. "

Therefore, he measures data transfer from up to 32Kb/s and then 32Kb/s to 64Kb/s.

What is the difference and is this offer more favourable or less so than compared to our colocation supplier.

Thanks

Ja

kbps is how most TRUE colocation facilities measure bandwidth...Actually in mbps. GB's are something that we've come up with as an easier to understand method.

32kbps is the equivelant of 10GB's of bandwidth.

It sounds to me like it's the same deal, just one is based on kbps and the other on GB's

Here is a program to help you convert kbps into GB's:

http://mescripts.com/convertme/convert-me.php

Hope I helped and didn't confuse.

Originally posted by jjma

"For a burstable PAYG feed, measured using the 95th percentile method, you are charged the higher of incoming or outgoing data, but not both. "

Therefore, he measures data transfer from up to 32Kb/s and then 32Kb/s to 64Kb/s.


Doesn't 95% mean that it discards the top 5% of the samples taken over the entire month?

ie, a theoretical way you may be charged more is if you have were transferring (incoming or outgoing) at, say, 500Kbps for 6% of the month (maybe you were downloading lots of OS patches, or some high bandwidth users were downloading from you or something) and had absolutely no transfer at all in the rest of the month (poor you). That 6% of downloads comes out to about 10GB, which would be free under your present billing scheme, but under the new billing scheme, you'd have to pay for the 500Kbps tier because the highest sample remaining after discarding the top 5% is still 500Kbps.

Of course, this example is quite contrived. How disadvantageous it is really depends on your exact traffic pattern. If you know that you will use 100Mbps for < 5% of the time and < 32kbps for > 95% of the time, obviously the new scheme is advantageous to you :)

The final answer of which is better for *you* depends on *your* traffic patterns. I'm also assuming here that both network providers provide the same quality of bandwidth and service -- something that is not a given.

Originally posted by MikeA

Here is a program to help you convert kbps into GB's:

http://mescripts.com/convertme/convert-me.php

Hope I helped and didn't confuse.

Just out of interest I showed the colo tech the link for conversion and here is his own calculation on 64kb/s:

64Kb/s means "sixty four kilobits per second"
Multiply by 60 to get 3840 kilobits per minute
Multiply by 60 to get 230400 kilobits per hour
Multiply by 24 to get 5529600 kilobits per day
Multiply by 30 to get 165888000 kilobits per month
Divide by 8 to get 20736000 kilobytes per month (8 bits in a byte)
Divide by 1024 to get 20250 megabytes per month
Divide by 1024 to get 19.77 Gigabytes per month

Assuming that networks for both colos are the same I think I will go with the new centre as it seems more in line with my current data usage.

Thanks

Ja

But his calculation assumes that you are pushing 64kbps ALL the time which this fool thinks is well nigh impossible

Or am I stupid?

Cheers
Balaji

Originally posted by MotleyFool
But his calculation assumes that you are pushing 64kbps ALL the time which this fool thinks is well nigh impossible

Or am I stupid?


Not sure Motley. I know we will probably not push the 64 kbs envelope consistantly for the whole month but I think the colo tech was presenting the possibilities of a 64kbs burst over a month.

Ja