XXXWebhosting & 95 Percentile

[shunga]

The host I'm with, and who I've been very happy with, XXXWebhosting, is moving from a per gig payment plan to 95 percentile. I didn't think too much about that until I checked the new stats. I've gone from around 250-300Gb on per gig to almost 800Gb for the last 30 days, using 95 percentile. The drop in overage charges from $3 to $1.75 per gig doesn't cover the increase. The search I did on 95 percentile produced some very negative information on this "industry standard" system. What are your thoughts on this?

(This is NOT meant as a negative post on XXXWebhosting, I'm just looking for more information on an aspect of the business I know little about)

[Coke]

Yes, measuring bandwidth with 95th percentile is bad for your pocket, because if you use 2mb/s for only 5.001% of one month and 1mb/s for the rest of the month you'll still get charged for the 2mb/s.

I think you should probably talk to them and ask them to put you on the old per GB pricing. I don't recommend anybody to go for the 95th percentile method.

[ADW]

Hi,
95% is like buying insurance , You don't get capped (limiting bandwidth) and you can burst as much as you want.
You also get a 5% shave off the top.

Another choice is:

Capped bandwidth, You get capped but you'll always have to buy 30% more bandwidth to provide for the peak times. Thats 30% more bandwidth that you are probably not going to ever use, but need to be bought unless you want a slow site at peak time.

Another choice is:

Pay by gigs, you can burst and you don't get capped, but you pay a premium on this.


Each choices have their own +/- ... Depends on what you need really.

[emgee]

i'm with xxxwebhosting since last october,first with an virtual account,and since 3 months at a dedicated box.

i'm affected from this 95-percentile-method,i used there around 330gb last month,and now,with the other method,the price would be 30% higher.

sooo...i'm on the move.

the host was not bad,i hate to move,but i dont pay 30% for nothing;-)

,,,i run adultsites with spikes..and a hun-spike needs 3 days...lol

[Dancer]

Thats not always thrue. I dont get capped at my host, i can use as much B/W as i like. At the end off the month, it all comes to how much GB i used over the month. That means that i dont have to vory about peekhour, because i dont get caped. And vi all know, that our traffic, dont spread out nicely over the entire day, it's mostly peek traffic, and that's why i dont like to be on a capped connection. At the same time they have good prices and their support is the best. So i recommend a NON caped connection instead of 95% deals.
Check out for your self. www.bluewebhouse.com (http://www.bluewebhouse.com)

[emgee]

PS:
i'm not against this 95-percentile method.

but the host has to make a difference with the GB-price.
---the percentile-gb-price must be cheaper...thats the point.
and i think the price will be the same,so no difference between "real GB-usage" and percentile-method.

(only you pay 30% more..lol)

[shunga]

Is 95 percentile really the industry standard? I looked at Vector Force and they make a point of stating they don't use it, and I've heard a lot of good things about them. I can understand XXXWebhosting's reasoning to a certain extent, but as emgee said, no-one likes to pay for something they don't use.

I'm hosting pay sites and free sites on the same dedicated server. Perhaps I should leave the pay sites there and move the free sites..?

[emgee]

http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/004158.html

there is this percentile-**** explained.

i'm sure we get a reply from xxxwebhosting at this thread,to explain it bether.

[shunga]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by emgee:
the percentile-gb-price must be cheaper...thats the point.
and i think the price will be the same,so no difference between "real GB-usage" and percentile-method.</font>

They dropped the overage charge from $3 to $1.75 on dedicated's. I'm not completely sure about my bandwidth for the last 30 days, but if the increase is 50% a drop to $1.50 would cover the change. Their a good company, so it's something you should talk to them about first before leaving, emgee.

[emgee]

--i know they are a good host
--i hate to leave
--i talked allready
--my intentin to reply here is NOT to badmouth someone.

my icq
54543665

[Rodent]

There are plenty of places that bill on per gig and allow you to burst to whatever you need. Go take a look at the anouncement board for plenty of other great webhosting companies.

[emgee]

rodent,i don't search,i found allready;-)

[shunga]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by emgee:
[B]--my intentin to reply here is NOT to badmouth someone.</font>

I didn't mean to imply anything, emgee, sorry if it seemed like that.

This has all come as a very bad surprise. http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/frown.gif

[Energy Hosting]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by shunga:
Is 95 percentile really the industry standard?</font>

Yes, 95 percentile is the industry standard.
Most, if not all, large providers bill based on 95 percentile. Most likely your host pays the upstream based on 95 percentile.

1 GB at average/actual is about 3 GB based on 95 percentile or $1 per GB on 95 percentile is $3 per GB on average/actual.


Look at this example:

5% of a 30 day month is 36 hours.
Lets say you use 1 GB an hour for 48 hours and than you use 0.1 GB an hour
for 672 hours (rest of a 30 day month).
Using the measurement method above, you are going to pay for 720 GB that month when you actually transferred 115.2 GB. With us (or any other host that bills based on actual transfer) you would have paid for 115.2 GB.

I don't know why XXXWebhosting changed the way they measure bandwidth. Maybe they did it to compete with hosts that offer very low prices but bill on 95 percentile and XXXWebhosting loose many customers to these places that actually charge more but the advertisement makes it look that they charge less.

Dancer, do you work for bluewebhouse or own it? 3 of your 5 posts advertise them.

ps. we bill based on actual transfer, not 95 percentile.

[emgee]

i had the same "bad surprise"-feeling.
[[i could not add this missing "o" ti intention..hehe]]

shunga,icq me..lol

[xxxwebhosting.com]

Hello All!

We are billed as well on 95% billing, and almost all our competition has been billing their customers this way for years. Customers now want the lowest gig pricing and for us to stay competitive we had to lower our gig pricing and use the same method of billing.

We will change our Plan G in August to include 200 gigs base plan, and we have worked with many customers to help them with shaping their current bandwidth, that is the ones that were adversely effected.

Its our goal to stay on top of the market for quality service and reasonable prices. To do this we had to level the playing field with other hosting companies.

If any customers have questions about their bill I would be glad to call them and compare apples to apples.

Best Regards, Phil

[$tandaman]

http://hosting.likewhoa.com/faq/MRTG%2095th%20percentile.htm

Perhaps this will clear things up for some people.

We do not charge per gig on 95th percentile
You CANNOT charge per gig on 95th percentile, because Gigs is the ammount of transfer, mbps or kbps would be transfer rate, and that is what you are being charged on when you buy per megabit. you could create a conversion between gigs and kbps or mbps to aproximate.

http://hosting.likewhoa.com/flash/hosting_plans.html

[Energy Hosting]

If this countinues looks like we'll have to lower our prices to 70 cents per GB based on 95percentile and make more profit than we do now....so in the end people will actually pay for bandwidth more than they did when hosts billed on actual transfer.

"You CANNOT charge per gig on 95th percentile"
It is possible? yes
Can you? yes
Do I consider it tricking the client? yes
Do we loose sales because other hosts do it? yes

1024 Kbps = 324 GB in 30 days.
1024 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2654208000 bits = 331776000 bytes = 324 GB.

[hickmant]

This entire post is misleading. The only point that should be stressed is this:

1Mb/s ~ 300GB/mo

This means if you do 1Mb/s every second of the month you will be doing around 300GB per month.

However most users have a trend to their bandwidth and have peaks and valleys and actually only doing 150GB but use 1Mb/s on a 95th percentile.

Now the hosting companies will say, we get billed on 95th so should you.

But don't be fooled by this. It's all the same thing. It's just really good marketing. In my opinion you can either charge per GB (raise prices) take a small loss that is compensated by your profit or you can charge the exact same price under 95th.

We too get charged 95th by our providers. However I only charge this based on dedicated's because trust me $275.00/Mb to a guy doing 150Mb/s is alot more attractive than $2.00/GB, and in the end works out to be cheaper for those that have actual traffic trends which almost all users have.

And a hosting company should be trying to drive it's bandwidth up in order to get lower cost per meg pricing anyway.

Pro Hosters is at 400Mb/s within 4 months of business and not taking signups for 4. You can bet this drives down our price per Mb which allows us to resell at even cheaper rate.

The only problem I think is evident is the greed on the part of hosting providers.

Theodore D. Hickman Jr.
Pro Hosters L.L.C.

[xxxwebhosting.com]

Before we decided to switch to 95% billing we took a long hard look at our existing customers' bandwidth usage. What we found was a very small number of our customers using a high percentage of our overall bandwidth because of large spikes in their traffic. Since we wanted to keep extra bandwidth available to accommodate these traffic spikes, we needed to purchase bandwidth far in excess of what the average usage was. By switching billing to 95% instead of gigs transferred, some customers have seen their bills increase, while other's bills have stayed the same or decreased.

So what we found in analyzing our customer's traffic with the gigs transferred method of billing, was that everyone was paying a higher premium for bandwidth because of a small number of customers having large spikes in their traffic. With 95% billing, we're able to drop our bandwidth prices. Those customers that need a large amount of bandwidth held in reserve to handle big spikes in traffic will pay proportionally more, while those with more moderate traffic spikes who need less bandwidth held in reserve will pay proportionally less than they did under the gigs transferred method of billing.

We also have been working with the customers with large spikes from TGP's to help them shape their bandwidth on their TGP traffic sites. We do that by throttling the IP of the site so its not
full wide open like their paysite is. I run TGP sites and I make better money when the galleries are not lightning fast, let the load a little slower on the TGP stuff.. not super slow but not super fast. Shaping your traffic is a very important part of running traffic from TGP sites I think.

As for the question of charging per gig based on 95th percentile, we do use a conversion of 1 megabit/sec = 316 gigabytes for a 30 day period. We use this conversion so that customers will be able to compare the 95% billing to gigs transferred method of billing.

Also please note this does not apply to our virtual hosting customers.

[harvey]

I get the xxxwebhosting mail letting me know this and I asked them about this matter. Phil answered me within 10 minutes. Now that's customer service http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/smile.gif On the other hand, I'm sure I'll pay more and so I let Phil know about this and at the same time let him know I'll see what happens. If I'm not satisfied, I'll move. I'd hate to, but I won't give more money of what I'm giving in a "per se" harsh season.

btw, I did my research and I only could find 4 companies using this "industry standard". Of those, one is xxxwebhosting, one Likewhoa and the other Energy Hosting. None of the big players use this so called "industry standard". I mean, if I use a dedicated server, you can bet I'd done my homework and, even when you can lie me big time on technical matters, you can´t on what is of public knowledge.
Let's make it clear: I'm not against anybody, I'll wait to see what happens, but I got the cases ready to fly away

Just my 95% percentile

Poor Harvey in rags

[ProgGod]

We don't use 95/5 http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/wink.gif

[Energy Hosting]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by harvey:
I did my research and I only could find 4 companies using this "industry standard". </font>

First, we do not usually bill by 95 percentile at this time. There are many hosts that use 95 percentile but simply do not mention on their site that they use it, they write a per GB price.

Second, all bandwidth providers use this. That includes UUnet, Level 3, Verio, Qwest, Sprint, Internap, Globix, ELI, At&T, Genuity, C&W, Williams, Teleglobe, FNSI etc.

"I'm not against anybody," but you have to do your research MUCH better. Your information is wrong.

[*Kimmykim*]

We do bill by 95% to just about every large customer we have -- we don't bill shared hosting on it, but it's about the only type of accts we exempt. Most all the large hosts are billing 95th as well. It's the way that large hosts pay for their own bandwidth and it makes the most sense.

What 95th does is encourage people to look closely at their bandwidth and manage it correctly -- some of the largest sites on the web are hosted with us and they tend to run in very predictable graphs over the course of a day or a week, so it's not anywhere near as hard as you might think to control your usage http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/smile.gif