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How important is bandwidth limitation to you?
I'm not going to pretend that I'm not asking this as a provider, in fact I'll be quite open about my thought process here.
How important is monthly bandwidth limitation to you and how attractive do you find a quality VPS with either a very generous allotment or even unmetered?
The reason I ask is absolutely business related. I want high bandwidth allotments and even unmetered plans to be kind of my angle. From my point of view, affordable unmetered VPS are at least one of two things:
1. Shady, prefer to "look away" and pretend they aren't used for abusive purposes.
2. Outside of the U.S.
So my goal is to try to push quality, reliable services that allow you to use your VPN to your heart's content, stream LEGAL video without fear of overage, or just do what you normally do and not feel as though you've got a limitation that you need to monitor. I'm not advertising myself here, I'm honestly curious as to what you guys think about this. Call it "market research" or simply asking my friends for opinions. This forum attracts quite a few brains worth picking 
Comments
It would be ok for me, if, I'm limited to :
Standard bandwidth monthly 1TB at 100mbpsand capped to 10mbps after exceeding 1TB
or
Unmetered 10mbps
I feel like the OVH model is good, in that you get "unlimited" transfer, but your bandwidth gets limited after $amount. Obviously, you're not gonna be able to provide what OVH has, because they operate their own network. So you're gonna have to take a look at what you can work out with your carriers.
For most people on LET who require high amounts of transfer, they're usually the ones streaming stuff or proxying from China. These guys are usually ok. However, then you go the guys who are actively using the service as a seedbox or other such illegal things (yes, DMCA is a legal thing and you can get pwnt if you ignore DMCA notifications).
Up to you. When I see a low end vps with unmetered or unusually high transfer allocations, that usually is a red flag in my mind.
Manual work is involved, and manual work is for newbs.
Just do set limits, and then when it goes over they get suspended and can order additional Bandwidth.
I have noticed that fraud detection and monitoring the server for certain activity is fairly vital. One of my first thoughts is that by keeping it to low resource allotments, I can avoid the kid who has no idea how to torrent if he can't install firefox. E-mail spammer seems to be the one attracted to my current offer, but they're shut down pretty quickly. It certainly requires more work than a higher price and a lower bandwidth allotment would.
@jarland there's no easy way to monitor abuse without infringing on privacy. So just be sure to keep an eye on abuse@, and have a good policy on abuse.
I am not sure that manual work is required to lower bw after a certain treshold has been reached. Should be automatic.
For me BW is extremely important. I am only interested in high BW plans, not really matter the quality all over the world, but I will never sign for plans under 500 gb.
This is because I use surplus bw either for tor or freenet, depending on provider tos and other restrictions, such as io and space.
I tried in the past "unlimited" plans and they were having bad bw, even pushing all the time was never reaching the supposed speed, so I dont trust those. Only one that worked was eNS.
So I am settled now with Prometeus, they have huge BW with plans and as a bonus, it is also high quality at prices that beat at times even scams...
Hope Uncle Sal will always be here
M
its very important for me beacuse i dont want people to abuse it
Yes, make it modular. Ppl can get any upgrade they want, custom VPS. If I only want bw, I can add 3 tb at a decent price.
M
do you USE the 500GB?
If you are asking me, i try to. Not going for full 500 gb because i want to make sure there is a reserve in case there is more need for the primary objective of the vps. So, maybe 450 I will probably use. This makes providers nervous and start banning high BW apps because ppl are not expected to use what they pay for, in general. Others are throttling the connection till it becomes unusable. Others simply terminate without an explanation, but that is not the majority, I can live with more than half of the providers, which proves most are planning BW correctly.
M
@Maonique may I know who is you prefered provider? Which give you full access of the bw
@fly That seems to be an interesting line to ride as well. The last spammer made it easy. I was curious about sustained load, visited IP in browser and immediately hit a php bulk mailer. Checked the IP for blacklists, had been reported to a couple that day. Fun times, but not all of them are going to make it that easy I'm sure.
So I gather the important thing to a lot of people is the availability of extra bandwidth in need, not necessarily up front, as not sharing the node with abusers is important to you. I certainly share in the desire to keep abusers off the nodes. I'm ok with tor and such, so long as it doesn't prevent someone else from using a fair share of CPU and bandwidth, and I don't hear about it specifically being used for illegal purposes. I realize that stance can turn around to bite me but I'm prepared to take a hit every now and then, so long as it's me taking the hit and not other clients.
I can't think of a single 'unmetered' VPS company that I hold in high regard. If I see
unmetered in an offer I will tend to just pass it by because they have typically been
of low performance and low stability due to the customer or type of activity it attracts.
I typically wont buy a vps that doesn't offer at least 500GB (unless in a special market where bw is expensive.) even if I wont use over 1GB some months.
@ErawanArifNugroho In many years havent found one to be truly satisfied with besides eNS. It is the only provider I felt ashamed of using so much bw. Left unchecked was pushing 800 K on average so I reduced it to 500. 2 years ago was a real deal at LEB prices.
Now i am with prometeus, can order extra BW whenever I need, it is high quality and a 512 MB VPS can push 30 TB a month easily, but I dont spend that money even if it is that cheap :P
@JoeMerit I agree with 'unmetered' plans, even tho i was after those deals for a few years, didnt manage to find a good one till eNS and they failed a bit more than a year after I joined them.
Also I dont buy under 500 GB, even if Tor/proxies are banned, because a good BW alotment usually shows the bw quality too, if the provider doesnt have bad reviews. I find a way to spend it legally and in line with ToS/AUP.
M
Thank you Maounique
In the average, I only spent less than 20GB. That's only for downloading an update/upgrading, if I have to reinstall the OS. For a running webserver with domain on it, it just less than 5GB
I agree a nice chunk is always good, but it annoys me very much when a provider does not allow you to upgrade but forces you to upgrade to the next package.
Am actually looking at other methods, Throttling certain protocols at certain times etc. this way customers cannot complain that they are cut off or stuck on a slow speed 24-7
Please do not do this, if I pay for something let me use it how I like.
Only certain protocols though. Not all.
>
Just as bad a virgin then :P
No. They slow it down after certain traffic amounts not protocol.
I like large amounts of bandwidth (though invariably they're never fully used) and Gbit ports.
~$2.50/TB pricing (a la BuyVM) for overages would be lovely, too..
If you can easily ban the use of BT with scripts then it's not a problem to offer 1-2TB per vps plan because almost 80% of users will never go beyond their cap. For the ones that does, just give them an option to buy extra bw. Capping will turn them away.
When looking to purchase a vps I most of the time will pass if the bandwidth allotment is not at least 4x the storage size, and usually not less than 100gb/month. If I get 20gb storage then I should at least be able to fill it and then serve it at least 3x. Especially since most is calculated in either direction, not only for outgoing traffic (there asre some). The only exception I have made to this rule so far is a vps I got from ErrantWeb to test with, but it only had 2gb storage so I couldn't see really going over the 50gb cap, unless I used it as a vpn 24/7. I consider 100gb the lowest, 250-300gb to be an average offering and 500gb to be right around what I am really looking for , especially with a drive any larger than 20gb.
Now there are a few vps I have that on a few occasions I have gone over unexpectaedly, but most of them charge pretty realistic overages so I have no problem with paying it. I figure if the bw is good enough I have managed to use it to its max, then if I go over its worth paying that little extra for and if I think I will use over next month I look into upgrading. Also, I am yet to experience the provider who whould just shut you off when you hit your max, that would just be rediculous unless you were in some manner abusive.
One last thing, if I pay for 50gb I want 50gb, if 500gb of bandwidth, the same. I want to be able to use it all if I want to, any provider who would cut you off before you hit your max and it wasn not strictly an abuse situation would find me leaving their services quickly, and would earn a red mark in my book for any future business oppertunities.
My 2cent
Cheers!
Is paying $10 for 1GB unmetered 10mbps good enough?
Although my previous offer stands and will continue to be regularly stocked at controlled levels, I will certainly take all of this into consideration for my upcoming offers. I'm finalizing the numbers on them so it helps to not just think about what I want to see. The idea right now is that I agree with a lot of what was said and I'm thinking high (but reasonable) allotments with an easy and well stated path for additional bandwidth.
This is what I've found from pre-sales questions. "My VPS -might- need ___ GB/TB. Can I upgrade later?"
Prometeus offers about the same price, but it is EU BW.
I am not sure if anyone does this, I was using it in the past in my neighbourhood network to manage very expensive internet divided to 400-500 or so ppl.
Layer7 with filesharing lowest priority, so web browsing and games were snappy (tho 1-2 ms added) while filesharing was going strong in the night.
I realize 2-10 mbps connection is not much and can use a regular pc to do DPI while a big ass provider will need 24 cores or so, but will also have the advantage of DDoS mitigation (ban of IPs that send particular traffic, for instance) if you have a very fat pipe.
Anyone did it at big scale ? Does it even work like that ?
M
Neat! I'll keep that in mind. I'd like to see more US providers follow suit.