Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Question to Hosters: Bandwidth

[GezGas]

Do you pay your ISP for each "mb" bandwidth or do you have a fixed amount which you pay each month. (always wondered this)

[Cody Salter]

My personal ISP, Shaw Cable, gives me 160GB a month of personal transfer with a 25MBit connection. If I were to go over that, it would cost me in overage fees.

[CiscoMike]

It comes down to who you host with. For example:

Way back when I was with Server Beach. Part of my server package was 1000GB of actual IP transport. If I went above that, I got charged something like $0.25 per GB over that. When I moved to LayeredTech in 2004, I got 1500GB of IP transport and my overage fees were $0.15 per GB over that. I just switched to SoftLayer and they give me 2000 GB of IP transport and I'm charged $0.10 per GB above that.

Those are metered servers with fixed amounts of bandwidth. Then you have your unmetered crowd where you are charged only if you go above a certain percentile (like 95% in most cases). Or you could be held to say 20Mbps peak (just choosing numbers here for examples). It's all part of the plan offered by either your data center, ISP or hardware reseller (or even shared host provider).

[JayNL]

Originally Posted by Cody Salter

My personal ISP, Shaw Cable, gives me 160GB a month of personal transfer with a 25MBit connection. If I were to go over that, it would cost me in overage fees.

I think he meant for your servers

My partner always buys bandwidth in advance, in 500GB blocks.

[MHN Manager]

Hello, I`m from Ukraine, my internet connection 512 kbit/s, bandwidth = unlimit, price 30$/month.

[DDT]

In very general terms these days...most server providers or co-lo packages come with a basic amount of bandwidth, then extra charges above that.
Some data centers offer more choices with "premium" bandwidth VS "budget" bandwidth (depending on the carrier & the network) and you pick the cost that suits your need for better fiber network service.

The most expensive are centers offering multiple-redundant high-end providers. At that level you are usually buying bandwidth in smaller units than with "whatever is available at the time" bandwidth which is usually sold n larger packages or units.

It also depends on if you are leasing or co-locating 1 server or 1/2 rack or a rack etc. because they know bandwidth needs will be different.

[viratshah]

we have a 100mbit dedicated line shared amongst our rack

[Enterhost_Dustin]

Price per MB/GB is still widely used by bandwidth providers. Some providers will charge a flat fee for a physical line and then have separate commentment levels and some will be just a flat per MB fee. Overages can be charged per MB or by using the 95th percentile.

[KDAWebServices]

Most hosts of any sort of size will be buying bandwidth per Mbit/s, with a commited monthly rate (CDR) i.e. 50Mbit/s.

[Mustang302]

This might be a stupid questions but... Why do companies like Rackspace.com and many other Tier1 facilities charge so much for just 1500/GB Month transfer compared to so many other dedicated hosting providers?

Why does 1500 GB/month seem the standard? How many page views does this equate to, etc?

[KDAWebServices]

1500GB isn't standard, it is for the market that sells to WHT i.e. the oversellers, but it's far from standard.

1500GB is about 7.5mbit/s of bandwidth (could be more, could be less, depends on the traffic patterns). Even with dirt cheap bandwidth @ $10/mbit that's $75 worth of bandwidth - without factoring in the routers, switches, network techs etc. So if we said the real cost was double or triple (or even more) that if we throw in some decent providers we're talking $150-$225+ for the bandwidth alone. Hopefully that explains it

[rslyon]

Hosts renting servers from a provider pay per Gb over their limit.
Hosts using their own servers in a Datacenter normaly start off with a 10mbit/s link burstable to 100mbit/s to their rack for all their servers.

[KDAWebServices]

We've got some customers hosting their clients that rent single servers that pay per mbit

[CiscoMike]

you also have to take into account that most data centers are oversubscribed on bandwidth (this is fairly standard in the industry) so you'll see plans that allow for manageable oversubscription on their end. For example:

Many people have multi-gig links from different providers. However when you conisder a data center of medium to large size has a few thousand boxes racked up, even if everyone was 10Mbps connected, the data center would be in trouble if all hosts went and started blasting at wire rate. It's an unrealistic scenario shy of a new worm outbreak like Slammer or a NIMDA variant and that's why the bandwidth isn't 1:1.

Point being, data centers are managing their bandwidth and the plans they offer often reflect their willingness (or lack of) to oversell their bandwidth in a way they know they can somewhat control and respond to in the case of high utilization.

[bqinternet]

Generally, shared hosting and dedicated server providers charge per GB of data, and colocation providers and internet backbones charge by the Mbps speed. Per-GB transfer was designed to be easy to understand by the typical user, but the providers themselves are not paying their upstreams per-GB.