New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
IMO
bandwidth = port speed = link speed
traffic = data transfer
"unmetered bandwidth" kind of makes sense imo, "unlimited" doesn't.
It seems to be really unclear, it's almost 50/50 whether a provider will use "bandwidth" to mean traffic or not. At least most big providers like Hetzner, AWS, ... use the proper naming convention
Traffic usually means a fixed amount of data over a time period. Bandwidth is the rate at which you use your data.
Unlimited BW/Traffic would mean you're able to blast to the full port speed, and use any amount of data per month. Unmetered would have some stipulations usually specified in an AUP or somewhere similar.
We offer unmetered Traffic but you're only able to burst to 1g. Bandwidth limits are specified in our AUP. Hope this helps explain some things
And the funniest thing is that in hosting and networking bandwidth is measured in bits per second whereas by definition it is a unit of frequency (Hz).
Bandwidth has multiple different definitions in multiple subfields of mathematics (graph theory, statistics, linear algebra) too. There is no one correct definition.
think bandwidth as a water pipe, 1inch pipe, 2 inch pipe.
and data transfer is the amount of water that flows within that pipe (in liters)
I like corn.
double bandwidth = double speed?
I noticed that Linode uses "transfer" but Vultr uses "bandwidth"
Perhaps but the colloquially used term "bandwidth" for internet speed was derived from signal processing's definition of bandwidth.
Hi,
from my experience:
bandwidth is and was commonly used between carriers / who ever buy traffic from who ever sells traffic / and or route it in a professional way.
You will either buy a flatrate port ( alias unmetered port that was lately introduced somewhere ( i guess) for the endcustomers who had issues with the term "flatrate" ).
So what ever flows through this port, its included in the price.
OR you will buy in 95% while 95% is the last highest peak you produced on a port, after you removed 5% of the highest peaks you produced.
And exactly thats where the term "bandwidth" comes into play. If you imagine a traffic graph, it will look like a frequencyband you might know from oscillating signals.
And with all this fiber cables we have lately, you might know that a normal fiber ( alias dark fiber = a fiber without signal, just the cable ) comes to live by using CWDM or similar modules.
You can imagine this CWDM as something that will create virtual fiber connections with one dark fiber using different wave lengths of the light. This way you can send more than one signal through the dark fiber, instead of just one. -- Would be simply too expensive / not scaling if you would just send one signal through one cable -- like its common for RJ45 copper cables.
So this wave length alias bandwidth ( thats actually not really correct from the perspective of sience -- but the good old sales never cared about such details... ) is imho probably why this was introduced by the sales as term...
So while the carriers / who ever does routing is refering to the 95% value when talking about bandwidth to refer to the amount of data going through...
...The normal customers ( or younger fellow's among us
) will want to talk about more simple numbers like X TB traffic or " unmetered ports " ... less science , more easy 
So to answer your question @tothost if someone use "bandwidth" its not the wrong term. It just an " old " term or a term used between people who usually buy traffic in higher amounts or from different sources.... or maybe who ever asked is just already an old ager, just like i am ;-;
Thanks for the insight, however I still don't see the translation of 95%-rule metered bandwidth to traffic quotas listed by vps providers.
The 95% rule translated to water pipes would basically mean "you pay for a 1inch pipe but you get a 1.5inch one and are allowed to burst past the 1inch pipe's capacity in 5% of the time". "Bandwidth" makes sense to be used because your upstream cares to what extent you are using your port's capacity in a specific moment.
But how does a vps provider then call a total usage limit, such as like 6000 liters/gb, "bandwidth"? Because the total usage limit does not account for whether I use 100mbit constantly for 30 days or 1gbit for 3 days, where the 1gbit usage is probably more likely to cause upstream overuse pricing compared to the more evenly spread-out usage.
Hi,
you are right.
While 100 Mbit for 30 days = 95 Mbit on 95%
a 1000 Mbit for 3 days = 950 Mbit on 95%
While 100 Gbit for 35h = 0 Gbit on 95% ( 5% are worth around 36 hours if i remember correctly ).
In the end its bandwidth, which is basically the correct term.
You cant confront the majority of the users/customers with 95% or what ever billing scheme... it must be simple, simple enough that people with close to 0 (real) technical knowledge -- but who decide which datacenter/hoster will be their contract partner -- will actually understand what they buy.
Or they simply dont want to be on the risk side and have something that is easy to mathematical calculate, and might not escalate quickly when traffic comes the wrong way...
So the datacenter/hosters decided to math things to GB and TB and PB, ... while actually its bandwidth they talk about ( from the perspective of the datacenter/hoster )...
Maybe its also just more easy to call anything bandwidth, no matter what billing scheme ( Mbit 95%, Mbit AVG, Flatrate, GB-TB-PB, ... ) as its just the billing scheme that is different. Maybe this way confusion is avoided on the side of the sales, if one time they have to talk about bandwidth if they sell 95%/AVG/Flat and another time they have to use traffic or what ever as term.
We also use bandwidth, its just because we use it since 20 years.... when 1 Mbit 95% was 180 EUR/month XDDD -- single homed... and i think most will understand it.
Even in combination with an absolute traffic number, bandwidth is strictly spoken of course wrong....
Have some mercy with the oldies please
Actually, you have to express it like 1 Mbit/s 95% if it should make sense. Since bandwidth is a measure of speed you need time, not just amount.
I just recently realized that a lot of people do not understand the difference between bandwidth and traffic. Even providers very often use the wrong term.
Yes, i saw that my customers ask for "unlimited bandwidth", i always have to explain to them about the mistaken between bandwidth and data transfer. For example, you can get unlimited data transfer (about 1TB,... or more and more), but you can't have bandwidth in the range of several thousand Mbps.
I remember in the early 2000s many ISP used to call them as Bandwidth but a decade later it now called Data
Every term is good until it prompts clients to pay you