Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


[Bandwidth limit hit] What is the expected behaviour?
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.

[Bandwidth limit hit] What is the expected behaviour?

I'm asking the question as a service provider to LEB customers.

I'm considering doing a 100mbps or 1gbps port with a pre-defined amount of bandwidth every month (just say 300GB for the sake of having a number).

What is the expected behaviour of the host when a guest hits the wall before the end of the month? On a 1gbps port, that could happen very quickly.

Let's also assume that "you're getting close" emails are already part of the deal and that "buy more gigs" is also a part of the deal... but what about those customers who don't want to buy more? Although I have the ability to do a lot of things, I've only come up with two choices that really make any sense (kill the port or squeeze the pipe).

I'm curious what other people have experienced for better or worse.

Comments

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited June 2015

    In my experience most VPS hosts really don't care if you go over because of the massive amount of customers that don't even use a fraction of what you sell them. A lot of hosts just let it slide and let you keep going.

    Many have probably never even had to answer this question, because people so consistently use less than what you sell them.

  • MultiMulti Member

    Usually your VPS gets suspended till the end of month.

    But especially in germany many hosts limit your bandwith to 10mbps for the rest of the month. I kinda like that option. So your server is still online and you can consider buying more bandwith or just wait and have a slower network.

  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider
    edited June 2015

    Depends on your contract, known outcomes:

    • Bill for overage at the end of the month

    • Network suspension when going over

    • Limited network speed when going over

    If you aren't happy to pay for the overage, you should normally watch your usage and make sure you won't go over it.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I prefer the suspension option because no chance of overages for any party involved.

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited June 2015

    Multi said: Usually your VPS gets suspended till the end of month.

    But especially in germany many hosts limit your bandwith to 10mbps for the rest of the month. I kinda like that option. So your server is still online and you can consider buying more bandwith or just wait and have a slower network.

    Yep either of these is fine, but what you should never do (at least by default, without the user explicitly opting-in), is any kind of auto-charging or invoicing for bandwidth consumption.

    Also typically hosts send a warning E-Mail as soon as your usage approaches 90% (or so) of your allocation.

  • You could also reduce the port speed to 10MBit or smth like this.

  • Typically suspension is what most providers here do - or at least that's what they claim, I've had providers message me saying I'm over and go "we'll leave it up, you're not over by a ton and you reset in a couple days. If you plan on this kind of traffic consistently, please pay $X/TB for extra bandwidth or upgrade to next package"

    Ideal situation would be to limit port speed, so if someone hits their cap just bump them down to <10 Mbps, or whatever is reasonable to you.

    @doverland I was planning on taking off since 5mbps is pretty useless to me, but if you go up to a metered >100Mbps or 1Gbps I'd be happy. Most people will come in way way under that anyways. 500GB-1TB @ >100Mbps is infinitely more useful than 5mbps unmetered (to me).

    Most people won't abuse that limit or get close to it. I have 10-20TB+ on 1Gbps for most of my dedicated servers and a busy month will be 4-5TB total (in & out) on 1 or 2 of them. I'm typically at 10% usage. If I'm doing bandwidth-heavy stuff, I'm purposely seeking out a OVH or Online.net-type host with true unmetered.

    Also: if you're thinking 100, I'd try to aim for 150-200, there's a big 'usefulness' jump there too between 100 and 200, 100 feels constrained, 150+ feels like a big leap forward when moving bigger files around.

  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    I don't expect anything because no provider manages to inform their clients about the procedure. -> need to ask
    I'd prefer throttling over shutting down over overage charges

  • LeeLee Veteran
    edited June 2015

    KuJoe said: I prefer the suspension option because no chance of overages for any party involved.

    The best option ^^

    Jar said: A lot of hosts just let it slide and let you keep going

    The worst option ^^

    You buy 1TB of bandwidth, you get 1TB of bandwidth. You use it all then you will need to wait until the next cycle to get more.

    I say that @jar suggests the worst option because what happens is that you let it slip month on month you are accepting they are using bandwidth they are not paying for.

    6 months later many are doing it and your overall limit starts getting squeezed so you enforce the right limits to prevent costly overages for you the host and all of a sudden become an unreasonable fucker with a bad review on LET/WHT.

    Thanked by 3jar Pwner Traffic
  • J1021J1021 Member

    Jar said: In my experience most VPS hosts really don't care if you go over because of the massive amount of customers that don't even use a fraction of what you sell them. A lot of hosts just let it slide and let you keep going.

    Most here use SolusVM which will auto suspend once the data transfer quota is hit?

    I'm really pushing my luck on my DO 512 plan.

          Jun '15      7.76 TiB |    7.98 TiB |   15.74 TiB |   82.29 Mbit/s
  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    kcaj said: I'm really pushing my luck on my DO 512 plan.

    o.o I would not dare that when it says "Additional bandwidth transfer is only 2¢ per GB"

    so 15TB overage = $300? O.o

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    4n0nx said: o.o I would not dare that when it says "Additional bandwidth transfer is only 2¢ per GB"

    so 15TB overage = $300? O.o

    AFAIK they haven't figured out how to account bandwidth yet.

  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    perennate said: AFAIK they haven't figured out how to account bandwidth yet.

    XD!

    I hope for kcaj that they won't suddenly figure it out and charge him...

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited June 2015

    4n0nx said: I hope for kcaj that they won't suddenly figure it out and charge him...

    I'm sure they'll send an announcement.

    Edit: also hourly billing + plans that have a monthly bandwidth allocation makes things complicated. What if someone provisions a bunch of virtual machines for a minute and uses the monthly cap? Can they provision more VM and do the same thing repeatedly, or do they have an account-wide bandwidth allocation and each VM adds an amount to it in proportion to how long it was active? Even in this case with account-wide accounting, assuming it's a prepaid service and bandwidth is charged immediately on overage, then how do you deal with someone who provisions a VM, goes over their bandwidth allocation (and gets charged), but then provisions a bunch more VM that they keep for the rest of the month (and so total allocation for the month is lower than their total usage)? Should that charge be refunded?

    Google Compute, AWS, etc. model makes much more sense where you just pay per GB, no included limit, and certainly no monthly / hourly allocation. Of course then you get people wondering why the traffic is so expensive and not realizing that traffic elsewhere is oversold 5x+.

    Thanked by 14n0nx
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited June 2015

    kcaj said: Most here use SolusVM which will auto suspend once the data transfer quota is hit?

    SolusVM will allow you to set it not to suspend on bandwidth overage.

    4n0nx said: I hope for kcaj that they won't suddenly figure it out and charge him...

    We'll be very vocal about it when it happens. If he gets caught off guard by anything he only needs to talk to me. I'm nice at least half of the week :P

    Thanked by 4J1021 trvz 4n0nx Pwner
  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    Jar said: We'll be very vocal about it when it happens. If he gets caught off guard by anything he only needs to talk to me. I'm nice at least half of the week :P

    you work for DO? o.o idontgetit

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    4n0nx said: you work for DO?

    Yep, let me know if I can ever do anything for you!

    Thanked by 14n0nx
  • J1021J1021 Member
    edited June 2015

    4n0nx said: I hope for kcaj that they won't suddenly figure it out and charge him...

    From their IRC channel

    kcaj: ?bandwidth

    RandyTheRaccoon: The droplets run on shared full-duplex 1 Gbit/s port per hypervisor. Once the monthly transfer limit has been exceeded, the cost of additional transfer is $0.02 per outbound GB. Until monitoring is implemented in DigitalOcean's control panel, you will not be charged for exceeding the monthly transfer limit.

    ..

    Jar said: We'll be very vocal about it when it happens. If he gets caught off guard by anything he only needs to talk to me. I'm nice at least half of the week :P

    ;)

    Thanked by 14n0nx
  • shellshell Member

    @kcaj said:

          Jun '15      7.76 TiB |    7.98 TiB |   15.74 TiB |   82.29 Mbit/s

    yes we are lucky haha

    May '15     17.53 TiB |   17.52 TiB |   35.05 TiB |  112.41 Mbit/s
    Jun '15     11.26 TiB |   11.24 TiB |   22.50 TiB |  116.74 Mbit/s
  • brb.. Moving my CDN to DO

  • If one of our customers 'massively' exceeds our guidelines (10x or more the allowance in a 24 hour period) then we throttle to 10mbps for the remainder of that billing cycle.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    I would prefer that I get a warning (email or whatever) when reaching 80% and 90% usage. Then I would accept two alternatives. Either suspend the VPS/dedicated or limit the traffic.

    If I would be charged for the bandwidth used over my limit I would drop that provider, no matter how good the provider is. That is how I keep myself under control, know my expenses. Makes it easier to calculate for a profit.

    Thanked by 1Pwner
  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    Ginernet suspend you VPS, when one of my bellend mates raped all my bandwidth via VPN I got a couple of warnings that I was getting close, and then I got shut down. In all fairness, they did unsuspend me to have a look and work out what had happened, as had believed there was no way my mate would be so stupid as to eat 100GB in 48 hours, but apparently I was wrong.

    Thanked by 1Pwner
  • emgemg Veteran

    As a VPS customer, I can say that:

    • It would be helpful to receive one or two warnings as the bandwidth limit comes close.

    • DO NOT charge an extra fee without my explicit consent. I want to know about AND approve any invoice changes in advance.

    Here are a few more thoughts:

    • The warning messages are an opportunity to offer an upgraded plan. Please make sure that the warning is prominently displayed at the top, the offer at the bottom.

    • If I am a long time customer and have generally low bandwidth usage, it would be nice if you would cut some slack for a first time or very rare bandwidth-exceeded event, such as if my website were "slashdotted" one time. Work with me.

    • Many of my VPSs have not been very good at reporting bandwidth usage accurately. The variance goes both ways - too high or too low. Since I never come close to using the allocated bandwidth, I don't worry about it.


    Here is an example of how NOT to do bandwidth limits (data caps):

    • A year ago, our ISP (AT&T) instituted a 150 Gbyte monthly data cap on the home DSL service with almost no advance warning. They charged the same price as before. We were forced to "ration" Internet activity at home to stay under the cap.

    • AT&T's data usage web page was awful. The reported data was not current. The displayed total data consumed value was at least three days old, sometimes four. At least they showed you the past date of the data value, so you could try to estimate the current data used value for today's date.

    • AT&T's overlap fees were high, and they were automatic. The minimum excess data fee was more than 50% of our monthly rate.

    • You could not really use the full cap amount. You were forced to give up some of your data cap to make sure you did not run over the limit. One month we accidentally ran 25 megabytes over the 150 Gbyte limit. AT&T charged us the full minimum fee for extra data.

    • AT&T sent warnings by email, but since their reporting system was several days behind actuals, it did not always help. By the time you got the "near the cap" message, you may have already exceeded the cap.

    • The reported data usage was not accurate. I know that because I used my firewall to measure actual usage, and ran tests to verify the firewall's correctness. It varied, but AT&T typically reported 5% higher data usage than actual. I have read articles where the authors claimed similar results.

    We switched to Time Warner Cable soon after that. It is far more expensive than AT&T, but the bandwidth (data RATE) is much higher, and they have not (yet) instituted caps. The fact that I do not have to monitor and project our data usage is worth the extra cost alone.

  • @emg good rant at AT&T

Sign In or Register to comment.