Colo-Cation - Your Connection for reliable hosting

How does 95th percentile billing work?

95th Percentile is a method of measuring bandwidth that bases your bill on peak utilization. Your bandwidth is measured from the switch or router and recorded in a log file. At the end of the month, your usage statistics are sorted, and the top 5%, or 37 hours, of data is thrown away, and that next measurement becomes your 'utilization' for the month.

So, if you had a great weekend promoting your site, and used 3mb/sec for two days, you would be billed for the 3mb/sec rate -- potentially much more expensive than your average bandwidth utilization or actual utilization.

We base your bill on your actual data transferred. Period.

Take a look at this graph which was taken from a company that moved to us almost two weeks prior to the end of their billing cycle. Even though they weren't using the circuit for the last two weeks, note that they would STILL be paying for 1.28mb/sec.

When someone says they bill on the 95th percentile, RUN. It is a method of billing you for much more bandwidth than you are actually using.

If your site gets frequent bursts of traffic, you cannot AFFORD to throw money away like this.