Lower bandwidth prices and an updated model of billing

The_Moose

Starting today, a few of you may start to see a new post on your invoices: https://dash.99stack.com/billing/invoices labeled "bandwidth". The reason for this is an update aiming to make bandwidth billing more flexible and to provide a better overview.

Lower prices

Starting today, bandwidth overage will cost no more than $0.01/GB in every region.

What is "bandwidth overage"

Bandwidth overage is any extra bandwidth used by a server instance, after the allocated bandwidth has been used up. The allocated bandwidth can e found in every plans specification, and typically range between 1 TB/mo up to 40TB/mo, on the first every month this pool resets. As of now, only 0.1% of our entire customer base uses more bandwidth than allocated.

What was the price before

Before the change, prices in Europe and North America where $0.02/GB, Asia $0.05/GB and the rest of the world $0.10/GB, this was drawn directly from the balance and didn't always show up clearly on the invoice which has caused some confusing over time. This is something we could have handled much better.

What about private networking

Private networking are being replaced by VPC's for improved isolation and safety of your server instances. As usual, network traffic transferred between instances on the same VPC is always free and unlimited.

On the public interfaces, we charge only for outbound traffic. All inbound traffic to your server instance is free of charge.

Marco_Weiss

I was wondering how the bandwidth was interpreted in the past, never fully understood the logic behind it.

$0.01/GB is great tho and cheaper than much of the competition. 👍️

Frederik_Madsen

Marco_Weiss It used to be added to the server price, which made the server price by the hour slightly higher but barely noticeable. All done without much transparency or insight.

A poor solution indeed, but probably with low priority to fix due to the fact that not many people would ever use more bandwidth than allocated.

For a time, servers would also power off in some regions and couldn't start until next month, or until the plan was upgraded with more bandwidth. Terrible solutions really. So this upgrade is a huge improvement.

Boris_Zaitseva

Frederik_Madsen Glad I never used more than allocated then, that sounds horrible.

AndrewLowrance

This is great news, I've never been over but I've always been worried about what happens if I use too much bandwidth. It's been almost a controversial topic with very limited information.

Pepe_The_Frog

Feels good man 🐸🐸🐸

I too was unsure how it worked before, you really need to update F.A.Q and the knowledge base.

Kauko_Laaksonen

Is there a daily limit too or will I get the full bandwidth quota if say I where to deploy a server today with just one and a half days reamining of the monthly allowance?

pingu

Kauko_Laaksonen It's recommended to divide the monthly usage by days of current month. In the case of February that would be about 35GB per day for the smallest plan with 1TB allocation per month.

Right now, that's considered "fair use" and may be used every now and then. But if this type of behavior is put into system to obtain a lot of bandwidth without paying, at the expense of others, you will get charged for that bandwidth.

Boris_Zaitseva

Sounds reasonable. 👌

Kenneth_Crayton

Good to see that at least some clouds isn't raising their prices during a massive financial crisis when a lot of people are already struggling. 👍️