95th percentile billing, rip off or industry standard?
 

Are hosts who bill on 95th percentile ripping webmasters off? Or are the people who say that blowing smoke up our asses?

Or maybe some hosts are locked into 95th percentile contracts with bandwidth providers so that's all they can offer? While other hosts have arranged new and better deals for bandwidth?

Your feedback would be appreciated.

usually you can choose 95th, 50th, or by the gig - but the pricing structure for 95th and 50th isn't gona be the same price. - then there's burstable and capped, the quality of the lines, 100% uptime guarentees, PRICE, service, etc that all factor into it.

Depends on the host Sleazy, some only offer 95th, some only offer per gig etc.

But yes the pricing structure does vary.

on hosts that offer all 3 they all tend to work out to the same net price.

Yunno, this is something that is true across the board. Hosting companies, sponsors, even McDonalds all offer their different value options or payouts (sponsors) in different configurations but they all work out to cost the same for the offering company.

The rip-off for 95th percentile billing only happens when a couple spikes happen for a couple hours each during the current month.

If you commit to 40mbit/sec burstable for the month you pay for your min of 40mbit/sec + the overage in your monthly usage.

So, lets say you commit to 1mbit/sec burstable and you get a few 'The Hun (tm)' listings during that month, you're 95th percentile might be somewhere like 2-3, maybe even 5mbit/sec while you may have used only 1mbit or 1.5 on avg.

Yeah that's true but as we were saying earlier it always works out about the same for the company. If you buy a bigger 3mb plan that would handle those spikes you probably would only use an average of 1.5mb leaving the other 1.5 as 'free pipe' and profit for the hosting company. This is why so many of them can safely oversell B/W at a loss (seemingly).

Lies Lies Lies - McDonalds extra VALUE meals are a bargain!!!!!!

Haha, from the pictures I have seen of you it would probably be smart of me not to argue with you on this subject.:winkwink: