Every business worth its salt has an online presence of some kind, and it uses computers and networks to run a business effectively in this modern business environment. One of the vital aspects of an online presence is bandwidth. Like water or electricity in your home, you pay for “currency” or “current” each month, based on the amount of water or electricity you use. It’s not static, like your cell-phone or cable TV bill.
Bursting the Budget
You may have a situation in your home where your water or electric bill is higher than usual. For example, your water line bursts while you were at work and you have a flooded yard, or you have a weeklong heat wave that causes you to run your air conditioning every hour that week.
These little “bursts” or “blips” in use can be budget-busters, though they may represent less than 5% of your usage in a month. But these can be events that could force you to spend more on your bill than what you may 95% of the time.
Paying the 95th Percentile
It might be nice If your electric or water utility would “excuse” these occasional bursts and charge you only for the most consistent demand by your household. Why not get the top 5 percent of your demand curve discarded from your bill?
Now think about how this might work with your online business and the bandwidth that it pays for each month. Most companies pay for demand (like a residential electric bill) instead of for restrictions (such as a cable TV, Netflix or Hulu subscription).
For the sake of your business, you may be one of those businesses which have surges of bandwidth demand because of sales or promotions, or increased media presence – in other words; your business is seasonal or occasional. When you have these demand surges, you can pay a lot more for the extra bandwidth in these short-term situations.
How Does 95th Percentile Billing Work?
When it comes to bandwidth based on demand, one of the fairest methodologies is what is called 95th Percentile Billing. A company like Volico provides bandwidth services based on demand using this type of billing, and it is more efficient and fair for your business.
Here’s how it works: A billing cycle split into 8,000 samples of five minutes each, and those samples, containing both incoming and outgoing traffic, are sorted from highest to lowest. The top 5% of that list are discarded including any short bursts of traffic in or out and the top-value sample left is the 95th percentile. The data rate posted in this sample is meant to represent 95% of the traffic rate across the entire group of samples.
The concept of 95th Percentile Bandwidth Billing has been a staple of Volico’s efforts to provide value for its customers. In comparison to other methods of calculating bandwidth, it apparently works out to be better, and it is considered an industry standard in the colocation space. Volico customers can choose the 95th percentile billing or flat rate transfer. Contact us today to customize your colocation plan with the amount of bandwidth you need!
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