Can someone explain to me how bandwidth overage works?

I see some companies offering 300 gigs of bandwidth.
But, I've been told that Rackshack's 300 gigs is actually 300 gigs.
But, most other companies it's less than 300 gigs...it may even be something liek 50 gigs.

Hey,
Companies charge by various methods. Here are three common ones:

95th: You take samples every 5 minutes for a month (assume a 30 day period). You have 8640 samples. 5% of that is 432 samples. You take the highest 432 samples and throw them out. The next highest is what your bill is calculated by.

Average: Every minute minutes a sample reading is taken. Every sample is averaged together to show your usage.

Throughput: A counter is set on your ip block to measure your total usage.

If your bandwidth is very stable and remains fairly constant, 95th provides the best value (from a customer's point of view). If your bandwidth is bursty, average is better.

It's generally not an issue, but it's fair to add that inbound and outbound often both count. So if you take a lot of uploads, you need to factor them as well.

We have one site doing fresh content several times per hour, and they might use 1GB-2GB/mo just in uploads.

Drew

There are many ways different companies calculate traffic fees. We simply add up all the traffic for a specific customer from the log files and go from that.

It really depends...you should ask the specific host how they figure these numbers.