Are the servers on a 10 mega bit or 10 megabyte line?

bit

INCORRECT

The 10Mbps unmetered servers are on 10Mbps Full Duplex drops.

ALL other servers are on 100Mbps Full Duplex drops.

I thought he meant the 10Mbps unmetered servers and was asking whether the 10 Mbps was megabytes per second or megabits per second.

I have 700 gig/month transfer. I'm looking at the RS MRTG and seeing 300 kbits to 500kbits on high times, with one peak at 700 kbits. I was told I had a 10 meg connection to the switch. Bit, or Byte? 700 Kbit/sec, is that 70% of my line speed?

Who told you your 700 GB/month server was on a 10 Mbps port? As Lighthouse says above, all servers other than the unmetered servers are on 100 Mbps ports as far as I know.

What does your bandwidth graph page say?
Mine says:
Max Speed: 12.5 MBytes/s (or 100 Mbits/s)

100mbit (the lan drop to your box) can transfer 12.5 megabytes per second
10mbit (the unmetered servers) can transfer about 1.2megabytes per second

I have been helping a few people looking at coloating some boxes and there is always lots of confusion in the megabit and megabyte conversion stuff.

those are of course the max theoretical I think the max I have actually done internally was around 8megabytes per second.

I've reached 86Mbps (10.75MB/s) before.

Everyone is on a 100 mbit connection unless you buy a 10 mbps unmetered box, in which case you are capped to that 10 mbps.

OK. I'm sorry for confusion, I do not have unmetered. So, 100mbit is my line speed, which could equal 12.5 megabye. (8 bits to the byte).

My history shows:

Date 8/6/03 3:02:17 AM Quota 700
(bytes) IN: 4,142,832,998 OUT: 3,577,845,111 Total Gigs
7.19
(Gigs) IN: 3.86 OUT: 3.33

My graph page says this:

System: 207.44.248.245 in Not Defined
Maintainer: Not Defined
Description: FastEthernet24
ifType: ethernetCsmacd (6)
ifName:
Max Speed: 12.5 MBytes/s

And the daily graph is labled "bits per second" with 700K being my highest marking in the chart. So, what I'm looking at is that my continuous transfer this month so far never exceed 700kbits/sec which is less than 1 mbit per second. So, I would say I'm not using more than 87.6 kbytes which is less than 1 mbyte or 1/12th of my actual line speed.

If this 1/12th of my line speed is correct, then I'm in great shape.

By the 95% rule, you will not go over bandwidth as long as you average 2240Kbps. That would be 700GB/month.

Rackshack does not use the 95 percentile to bill. Beyond that I don't think that you are really clear on what it actually is.

95% billing states that they make a chart of your server's transfer rate (ie: 2240 kbps, 1900 kbps). They throw out the top 5% of readings and charge you based on the next one listed. In an arbitrary example, say that every day in a month you do 50 kbps except for a few, where you push 2500 kbps. Your chart would be something like:

2500
2500
...
2500
50
50
...
50
50

etc.

If over 5% of the time you were transfering 2500 kbps, you'd be charged for about 823 gig, when you probably transfered significantly less.

If less than 5% of the time you were transfering 2500 kbps though, you'd only be charged for a bit over 16 gig.

95% does NOT mean you're only charged for 95% of your bandwidth, which is what it seems like you calculated.

Bandwidth is measured by ACTUAL transfer at rackshack (a much more fair way, IMO). This means it doesn't matter how fast you transfer your 700 gig, as long as you do only 700 gig.

As such, it doesn't really make sense to look at your transfer rate at any given time to determine your bandwidth usage. Use the charts in the member's area and it'll tell you your gig per day. Use that as a scope. Transfer rate fluctuates too widely -- based on time of day, day of week, etc, to be used.

If you have a daily average that can sometimes give you a decent estimate of your usage though -- just multiply by .3294. If you are averaging 2240 kbps you'll actually probably go over your transfer a bit.

I wasn't trying to promote the 95% rule... He was just asking if he stayed under 700Kbps if he'd stay under his bandwidth... The answer is obviously yes... In fact, you could do 2Mbps and be okay.

I was just trying to give a rough guideline... If you don't go over 2Mbps in MRTG, then you're probably going to be just fine when the it comes time to collect on overages.

Good information from all. I'm running game servers, and I'm actually concerned with burst speeds. I wanted to make sure I have enough overhead, and had a momentary lapse of reason. I think I have this all straightened out.

I like the number examples on the 95%. It was explained to me by verio in the past, and I didn't quite understand it, but I was sure it sounded like I could be over charged.