How 95th Percentile Billing is More Beneficial for Volico Clients

August 13, 2018

95th percentile billing is how Volico charges for bandwidth. A handful of short traffic spikes never sets the price for your whole month. Every business has an online presence of some kind. Running one takes computers and networks. 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 for what you use. It’s not static, like your cell-phone or cable TV bill.

Bursting the Budget

Occasionally your water or electric bill comes in higher than usual. Say a water line bursts while you are at work and floods the yard. Or a heat wave runs your air conditioning around the clock for a week.

Those bursts can be budget-busters, even though they may be under 5% of your monthly usage. Yet those few hours can set the price for the whole month.

Paying the 95th Percentile

It would be nice if your utility excused those bursts and charged only for your consistent demand. So why not get the top 5 percent of your demand curve discarded from your bill?

Now apply that to the bandwidth your business pays for each month. Most companies pay for demand, like a residential electric bill, rather than a flat subscription.

Your bandwidth may surge around sales, promotions or a burst of press coverage – 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 methods is 95th Percentile Billing. Volico provides bandwidth services based on demand using this type of billing. It is more efficient and fairer for your business.

Here’s how it works: A billing cycle is split into five-minute samples, roughly 8,640 across a 30-day month, Each sample covers traffic in and out, and Volico sorts them from highest to lowest. Volico discards the top 5% of that list, short bursts included. The highest sample left is your 95th percentile. That sample’s data rate represents 95% of your traffic across the whole billing cycle.

95th percentile billing has been a staple of how Volico delivers value to customers. Compared with other ways of calculating bandwidth, it works out better for uneven traffic. It is also an industry standard in the colocation space. Volico customers can therefore choose 95th percentile billing or flat rate transfer. Contact us today to customize your colocation plan with the amount of bandwidth you need!