Re: [cobalt-users] A Word About Cobaltracks.Com and Bandwidth Usage

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Wayne Sagar" <wsagar@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I don't think many hosts will keep their client base for long if they do
> the limiting..

You get what you pay for.  Every one of these companies is trying to make a
profit.  If the price you're paying seems to good to be true the company is
probably doing at least one of the following: providing
no/little/terrible/slow customer/technical service, severely oversaturating
their bandwidth, not providing you the features you may want in a data
center (security, a/c, significant backup power, raised floors, fire
suppression system, around the clock staff) or losing money.  Don't get mad
if you're company is overselling their bandwidth - as long as you are able
to achieve the data transfer and burst levels that are promised.
Overselling bandwidth is just smart business.  A T3 line is equivalent to 30
T1 lines.  In order to stay price competitive a data center with a T3 must
oversell their T3.  They can sell a customer a T1 connection and can promise
that the T1 capacity will always be available to them and they can do so by
selling...oh, let's say 50 connections from a single T3.  How?  As long as
the total simultaneous bandwidth used by the 50 customers is less that that
bandwidth available on a T3 all 50 customers have the capacity they expect.
Since a T1 customer is going to experience variations in traffic over the
course of the day (and may not even need anywhere near a T1 in the first
place), the data centers know through imperative data that statistics
project that they can sell X T1 lines from a T3 and usage will be below
capacity Y% of the time.  There's only a problem when Y% is lower than the
customer expects (due to severe overselling of capacity) and they are
affected by it.

That said, I believe that most data centers whose prices are too good to be
true are doing a lot of overselling and are not up to par in other areas.
If you ever look at the prices at the major data centers you'll see quiet a
difference.  In this business it seems that customers without large
ecommerce sites or mission critical projects are only focused on finding the
lowest price provider...and then bitching when they don't get the service
they expect.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/