Bandwidth
If you're a high bandwidth customer then our usual "gigabytes per month" data transfer commitment may not make sense for you. It's not the way that bandwidth is usually purchased in large quantities and it's not how BitFolk deals with its suppliers either.
Therefore, attempting to sell you a limit of a simple number of gigabytes transferred per month risks giving you a bad deal or exposing us to overage charges that we can't pass on.
95th percentile billing
The most common industry standard billing method for burstable bandwidth charges is referred to as 95th percentile billing. If you're in the market for large amounts of bandwidth then you probably know how 95th percentile works and just want to know our pricing. Here goes.
| Item | Monthly cost | Quarterly cost | Yearly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base VPS including 512kbit/s bandwidth 95th percentile | £8.99 | £24.70 | £89.90 |
| Additional 512kbit/s bandwidth 95th percentile | £5.00 | £13.75 | £50.00 |
| Additional 1Mbit/s yearly commitment, minimum 5Mbit/s | N/A | N/A | £72.00 |
| Overage outside of commitment, per 256kbit/s or part thereof, 95th percentile | £3.50 | N/A | N/A |
All prices exclude VAT.
For low levels of bandwidth usage you can choose whichever billing method you like. The majority of customers do very little data transfer and will probably find it much simpler to go with the included transfer quota of the usual method, therefore that is the default and we will not ask you about it unless you start doing much more data transfer.
If you try to order much more than about 750GB/month data transfer we will most likely insist that you switch to 95th percentile billing.
How it works
If you haven't heard of 95th percentile billing before, here follows a full explanation which should enable you to work out if it could make sense for you to switch to it.
We also specify our exact method since there are a few little variations in how providers do such calculations.
Concept
95th percentile billing is designed to give a fair treatment of bursting bandwidth requirements. It recognises the fact that there will be some spikes of usage but that most of the time the requirements will be much lower, and matches costs to those requirements.
Our procedure
The procedure is as follows:
- Rates of data transfer in and out in bits/second are measured every 5 minutes.
- At the end of the 30-day measurement period the 5 minute readings are ordered low to high, one set for the in readings and one set for the out readings.
- The top 5% of each (there's 8,640 5-minute readings in 30 days, so that is the top 432 readings) are discarded.
- The highest remaining reading in each set is your 95th percentile measurement for in or out.
- We bill you based on the higher figure of those two.
The above method will discard the top 5% of traffic spikes. That is, 95% of all individual readings will be at or below the level you are billed at. As a consequence:
- If you have a mostly constant bandwidth requirement then you will generally do quite well out of 95th percentile billing.
- If you have very spiky requirements then you will generally do less well.
- An anomalous bandwidth use event lasting less than 36 hours (432 × 5 minutes) should not feature in your billing at all.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know how much I can transfer for 512kbit/sec 95th percentile?
It totally depends on how "spiky" your traffic is.
If your traffic is very constant and remains near 512kilobits/sec at all times (less than 5% of readings above 512kbit/s) then it is a simple calculation:
- 512 × 1,000 bits × 60 seconds × 60 minutes × 24 hours × 30 days = 1,327,104,000,000 bits per month.
- 1,327,104,000,000 bits ÷ 8 = 165,888,000,000 bytes per month.
- 165,888,000,000 bytes ÷ 1,000 = 165,888,000 kilobytes per month.
- 165,888,000 kilobytes ÷ 1,000 = 165,888 megabytes per month.
- 165,888 megabytes ÷ 1,000 = 165.8 gigabytes per month.