Colocation Hosting Burstable Billing Explained

Burstable billing, often known as “95th percentile billing,” is an excellent way to tailor bandwidth available around a company’s specific needs and protect against unexpected spikes in billable Internet traffic. Deciding whether burstable billing is right for your business depends partly on a thorough understanding of what it means.

Most websites and web-based businesses pay for the amount of bandwidth needed to handle traffic to their sites. The goal for most businesses is to predict how much bandwidth they’ll need in order to avoid both buying unused bandwidth and having to pay overage charges due to higher-than-expected traffic.

Burstable billing makes this a little bit easier by letting customers exceed a pre-specified bandwidth threshold for short periods of time without extra charges. This benefits a website that receives a fairly steady amount of Internet traffic from a committed user base, but every now and then gets linked to by a popular blog or website and experiences unusual “bursts” in traffic.

Here’s how burastable billing works with the typical “95^th percentile” method:

1. Bandwidth readings are taken every five minutes — one of outgoing traffic and one of incoming traffic.
2. At the end of the month, the top five percent  of readings (approximately 36 hours of a 30-day billing cycle) of bandwidth usage periods are ignored.
3. Your bandwidth rate for the month is then calculated based on usage at the 95th percentile of readings.

There are multiple benefits of burstable billing (and features unique to CoreXchange customers):

• Billing not based on total monthly traffic.
• Protects against interruptions or downtime caused by unexpected bursts in traffic.
• Avoid high extra fees caused by distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks.
• CoreXchange’s online customer portal, CoreControl^SM, allows you the ability to monitor your traffic throughout the month.
• A highly redundant managed network with BGP-routed bandwidth
• A mesh of multiple Tier-1 carriers provides the performance and low latency required for applications such as VoIP and streaming.

Next on the CoreXchange blog, we'll explore just a handful of the benefits of another Internet billing option we provide — unmetered bandwidth. Contact us for more information, or check out our complete line of data center colocation services and advanced networking solutions.