RE: Hosting - Data Transmission Conversion Base2 vs. Base10
 

Okay let me preface this by saying I am happy with my host ...the uptime and speeds are great and I suck at math so if my explanation doesn't jibe with you mathmeticians sorry for my ignorance :)

Anyway I was a bit taken aback by this today.

According to webalizer I've burned 810019905 kilobytes in the last 7 weeks, which I converted to about 772 gigs.

My host tells me I'm wrong because I am converting that using base2 instead of base10 and that I have actually burned 810 gigs.

Anyway is this standard among hosts? I have not experienced this before.

I am happy paying the rate that I pay for my hosting and the support is excellent...however it seems like I will be losing approximately 60-70 gigs for every 1,000 gigs I burn...and that can add up over time.

Am I wrong to be surprised at this?

What does your host define as a gigabyte in their terms?

It is not defined...and was never discussed.

We discussed a price per 325 gigs...that is all.

That sucks. :(

First time I saw a host use 1,000,000,000 bytes as a gigabyte instead of 1,073,741,824 I was surprised, too.

I do think it's fairly standard, although I could be wrong.

Not that I agree with it though. If they're going charge by the gig, they should actually give you a real gigabyte instead of 93% of one.

Quite honestly I am very happy with this host...really.

They offer great support, my uptime is excellent etc.

I was just kind of surprised at this...and I guess I still am.

I was just wondering if this was standard or was going to become the standard.

the way i see it is that webalizer is only showing web requests that log does not include any of the bw that dns ect to server up thats what they might mean by the extra 60-70 gigs even that might be a little excessive but thats where they may be going with that. just my 2 cents.

webalizer bases their stats output as a kilobyte equalling 1024 bytes, not 1000... as stated in the README file included with the source code... kinda fucks things up when the stats software uses base 2 and then someone tries to apply base 10 on it...

No...the discussion I had with my host was based directly on what the webalizer stats said.

I have now read the webalizer stats read me file and this is what it states:
"KBytes

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the server during the specified reportingvperiod.
Thisvvalue is generated directly from the log file, so it is up to the
web server to produce accurate numbers in the logs (some web serversvdo stupid things when it comes to reporting the number of bytes).
In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic the server had, regardless of the web servers reporting quirks.

Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 :)"


The key thing is here is webalizer is calculating using base 2 and not base 10...as stated by the author of the program himself.

If you want to factor in other bandwidth such as ftp, etc, then you need to run those logs thru a stats package as well, unless you are using your own IP in which case you would use something like mrtg... which should also calculate a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, not 1000... I would have to look in the source code to verify that as well