On your plan plus your overage charges should you go over your alloted bandwidth?
Right now i beleive we're on a flat $1.50 with National Net.
I was talking to someone the other day who is still paying $5 per gig of transfer with their current host though :eek:
So how much are you paying per gig of bandwidth you burn?
Regards,
Lee
For our contracted usage, our bandwidth, which is a blend of ATT, Verio and Level 3 is something like 12 cents/gig. For overages, 60 cents/gig... but we track it fairly closely and if we're going to go wildly over, we can buy extra bandwidth (in lots of 500-1000 gigs) for about 12-15 cents/gig.
We had another provider that was about 30% less, but their bandwidth was "spot market" and they were constantly changing the blends and a lot of the bandwidth was really crappy... bad latency, high packet loss... so we switched. We've been with the current providers (2 different companies, different geographic areas) for about a year.
we pay around 11.5 cents per gig, and at our last host, we paid 23 cents per gig.
I pay .20 cents a gig
If your site is pushing a lot of traffic it may be best to ask your host to put you on 95th percentile.
Of course, you would have to be on your own dedicated server or have them put you on your own port for monitoring. If you don't have that much traffic you are best to stick on the per gig method but if you get on the 95th percentile you have better control over cost and also quality of service.
The graph will also show you any issues with bandwidth restriction or any outages.
You can learn more by Googling or looking at
http://inconcepts.biz/cr/95th.html
On that topic, prices per mbps.
Most of the time you will be at:
$150 for under 5 mbps
And then it will go down from there.
That would mean...if you pushed a level 5 mbps 24/7 for a full month you would pay $750. And 5 Mb/s would be about 1582 Gigabytes per month.
I see a per gig price from as little as $1.00 to up to $8.00.
This does not mean that $8.00 is to high. It's about quality of data and direct peering.
Take of example, Cogent. They have a relationship with Level3 but they are not a one for one peering so for every gig of traffic going through Cogent Level3 will only take a small percentage. The rest either gets dropped off or is delayed. The result is slower more unreliable traffic.
On mainstreaming hosting we charge $1.50 per gig but we use Sprint and Level3. They have direct peering with other tier 1 bandwidth and fiber. We also have a direct peering with COX so when someone is surfing at home on their COX system they get to our servers even quicker. With two redundent systems if level3 goes down Sprint will pickup all traffic. Even one here has dealt with a provider going down for 5 or more minutes. Having two really helps with reliability.
With that said, we offer a package at $3.00 per gig with 5 tier providers. If Sprint, Level3, ATT, XO, and Global would all go down there would still be UUNet that would carry the traffic. Of course, twice the cost but a lot more redundent.
It's all about the customer experiance.
Cheap bandwidth is that...cheap.
You will end up converting more traffic if you site is always up and fast. When webmasters focus on price their site performance begins to suffer.
I don't to get anyone mad at me but I would suggest you look at $1.00 to $5.00 per gig as reasonable. And $100 to $300 per mbps is good too.
Ask your hosting company what providers you have
What fiber is coming in and is it full sonnet with divergent paths
What bandwidth providers and how many you have going to your server.
There is a lot of inexpensive soltuions out there but if you business is focused on delivering products via the internet you need to look at this more.
Long ago when I started I had www.boysinc.com and it was hosting at OLM. When we opened up our own hosting division and added better bandwidth (at a premium price) our sales doubled. Now with a Pay Per View system we are committed to making sure that people can download and surf quickly.
Sorry for the long note.....but I had to add my 2 gigs worth.
Steven
where?Originally Posted by joneze
I agree with a lot of what Steven has written but I have to disagree on the bandwidth cost issue. The bandwidth market is a *lot* more competitive than it was even 2 years ago, and prices are extremely volatile depending on the physical location of servers... I've seen some amazing deals on tier 1 bandwidth out of the eXchange Colo data center in San Francisco, because there are a bazillion providers there looking to sell... and there are some insane deals on "surplus" bandwidth for traffic that's non-crucial.
It's quite possible to get very high quality (tier 1, no cogent, excellent peering) bandwidth for prices considerably less than $1.50/gig, but it all depends on where you are, how much bandwidth you're buying, the term you're willing to commit to. And my own experience is that you're much more likely to have outages due to the infrastructure of your provider than the actual Tier 1 provider's pipe going down... things like DDOS attacks, routing issues, etc... but I agree that having 3+ sources of bandwidth that's blended and optimized for routing and peering is important if reliability is important.
We have a bunch of servers in 4 different data centers. Interestingly, the one that has the most, um, "value priced" bandwidth has actually been every bit as reliable in terms of downtime (or lack thereof) as the all-tier-1 provider on the opposite coast. And the least reliable was a provider we no longer use that had exclusively Level 3, ATT, and UUNet bandwidth.
Bottom line for me is... the price of bandwidth seems to be what somebody can get away with charging. A friend of mine who uses a TON of bandwidth was getting totally shafted ($4-7/gig) at a large, very respected west coast provider that hosts a lot of major companies.
He moved to a "value" provider in Florida that proved less than reliable, but his bandwidth cost went from 5 bucks to 50 cents a gig. So... he went back and negotiated with the original west coast provider. Guess what? His $4-7 a gig went down to $1/gig for the *exact same bandwidth* and same service he was getting originally, from the very same provider in the same data center. So, as I said... price has a lot more to do with how good a deal you can negotiate and how hungry the provider is.
If customers are comfortable paying $1-5 per gig, it's not my place to say they're getting shafted... they may be getting a lot of support, handholding, service, and other benefits bundled into that price that can be extremely valuable. But when I'm paying no more than 75 cents and as little as 12 cents and getting very low latency, high reliability, and tier 1 bandwidth, I don't think it's reasonable to say that one must pay more than that to find reliable connectivity.
Chip,
You also had some good points.
It does come down to what you need the bandwidth for, what you are willing to do on your own, and what you able to manage.
I remember my early days I would call my "hosting" company every day to adjust my bandwidth and I left everything in their hands. DOS, ip-tables, and routing issues were beyond me. Of course, they charged a higher price for the bandwidth.
Most of our sites we manage is for main stream e-commerce sites and banks/financial companies. Needless to say the system and cost are built for a more special need. We still use a datacenter and have a few pipes in our cabs but we still maintain 24/7/365 NOC staff to make sure that when our sites or our clients get hit with a DOS that we can jump on it before the network comes down or a client gets hit with a $5,000 bandwidth fee. Not to mention if you have a BGP issues at 3am you have to have someone fix that ASAP or the whole network caves.
Okay..more geek talk to make a point.
Porn is porn.
But I see three types of site owners:
1- If you are going to manage your own networks, worry about your own DOS, and take an active part in your day and night management you will be better off. And if you can commit to a larger amount of traffic then you will get the best price.
2-I call these non-critical users. They sell on the web for extra income. Sure, if their site is down for an hour or more they will complain but it's not going to make them homeless. They have a great advantage for pricing as they are the casual user.
3. And the final user is someone that doesn't know how to spell CISCO or know the difference between a layer 1 and layer 7 switch...or even what a managed switch is for. But they need their sites up 24/7 and really need handholding and support. We all know these users as they are on the phone an hour or two a day to their hosting company. Although they watch their budget they understand the value in a good hosting partner and will pay a little premium on their services.
I used to think my $50 a month for hosting boysinc.com was expesive 7 years ago....now lots and lots of $$$$ later and lots and lots of servers I understand the differences.. <smile>
Any geeks out there that want to exchange stories at Vegas or Phoenix say hi. I'll have the "Red Apple Media" shirt on at the functions.
Steven
Nowadays $1.50 is alot... even for great hosting! I pay 16cents a gig.
Bandwidth is still always my fav topic.
"Unlimited bandwidth for $x"
Okay...so they will throttle it to a max of 1 Mbps but they can send out unlimited data (just so it stays under 1Mbps).
I see why hosting companies do this.
There is a real cost for bandwidth.
And there are different cost wit different providers.
Different providers also have different peering agreements.
We are at a few data centers and our costs really differ from provider to provider.
In general our "retail" cost for hosting sites are:
99 (cents) for 99.95% SLA/GIG/Single Homed
1.75 for 99.99% SLA/GIG/Dual Homed
If your site is pushing our large volumes then it is best to go with what is called 95th% also known to us as "MRTG" client. You are billed for bandwidth based on the 95% average of usage so you can spike really high and the top 5% will be knocked off.
Steven
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