17 Sep 08 95th percentile billing explaination

95th percentile billing commonly misspelled as “percential” is a method used by some NOCs to change for bandwidth.

The system is simple and essentially discards the top 5% of your traffic peaks, and then uses the next value down as your bandwidth rate. 5% of a month is 36 hours. This might sound like a bit of a scam, because you’re being billed for bandwidth consumption that you may not have used, but it’s not difficult to get it to work for you.

If you’re hosting a site where a lot of content is downloaded, it may be better to go for bandwidth billing. A client’s content server uses about 8,000GB transfer per month and shows a 95th percentile of 34mbit/sec. It’s certainly cheaper to pay for 8,000GB transfer over 30+mbit/sec dedicated.
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Tags: 95th, 95th percential, 95th percentile, bandwidth consumption, bandwidth management, bandwidth rate, burst, content, datacenter, download, Hosting, limiting, noc, peak, peaks, servers, shaping, traffic, traffic peaks