Colocation Bandwidth Billing – 95th Percentile Rule
All of our Colocation packages come with at least 1-5 Mbps included bandwidth. The Bandwidth usage is calculated with the 95th percentile rule. The 95th percentile is the smallest number that is greater than 95% of the numbers in a given set. The reason this statistic is so useful in measuring data throughput is that it gives a very accurate picture of the use and cost of the bandwidth. We take a snapshot of your bandwidth usage every 5 minutes throughout the billing period (usually 30 days). These 8,640 snapshots are then used to create the ‘set’ mentioned above. We then employ the 95th percentile rule to calculate your bandwidth usage and then bill accordingly if necessary.
The advantage to you as the customer is that you get the performance of a high-speed connection, while paying only for actual usage.
In the example above, we would take out the higher 5% of the Max In/Max Out bandwidth measurement from the monthly MRTG graph which is 884 Kbps. (You can think of this in terms of having the ability to burst above your committed bandwidth rate for about 36 hours per month without being charged an overage.)
We would then take the bottom 94% of the remaining samples taken, in this example that is 337 Kbps. Using this method each 1,000 Kbps is 1 Mbs per month. The percentage of bandwidth per Mbs would be x/1000 or 337/1000 = .337 Mbs or 107 Gb.
