Nothing is more annoying and troubling than being billed for bandwidth overusage, right? Here are 5 tips to prevent this from happening:
Monitor your usage closely — it’s very important to monitor your usage closely. This way you exactly know what’s going on and you can do an intervention right away when something is odd. This way you will save yourself from headache and unneeded issues. Monitoring is very important.
Limit ports — when you expect certain clients to overuse their bandwidth, or they are already overusing their bandwidth, it might be wise to auto-limit their ports upon overusage. This saves you and the client a lot of discussion afterwards and the client still has connectivity, and has time to contact you to find a suitable solution for both parties. Great solution right?
Enable alerts in your monitoring — you can easily enable alerts in your monitoring software (like nagios or observium) when a port hits a certain amount of in/out throughput. This way you can inform the client in a timely manner and avoid any discussion afterwards. It’s a great feature that your client will appreciate a lot.
Add DDoS Protection — DDoS protection these days is a must. It will filter the attacks without you being billed for the attack amount. This means that if you have a DDoS of 5Gbps for 1 hour or 2 hours, you don’t get billed for it. It will be filterred before it hits your network. Ideal right? That’s why we offer DDoS protection to our clients.
Prepay bandwidth — when you expect higher bandwidth usage, always upgrade. It will save you a ton of unexpected bills. With most providers prepaid bandwidth is about 5 to 10 times cheaper. It’s the way how the industry operated. If you use more than agreed, you have to pay for the overusage. Why? The provider also has to prepay for their bandwidth with their upstreams. If they all of a sudden use more than agreed on, they also get billed at a 5x or 10x rate then the prepaid rate. This all has to do with cable usage, transport etc. etc.
My advice is to use this information and get to use right away. Do the 5 things and you are assured of no headaches afterwards.
Take a look at our dedicated server plans. We offer plenty of bandwidth with them!