Burstable Billing

Network connectivity has become the most vital thing for any organization these days. Irrespective of the service provided by any organization, network connectivity needs are common to all. In between all this signing up for the exact bandwidth can be sometimes is so challenging. No one wants to keep their clients waiting not at least because of the shortage of bandwidth. The traffic on any website has also become very unpredictable. Seeing the patterns of these traffic companies have started opting for burstable bandwidth.

Now you might be intrigued just by hearing the term “burstable bandwidth”. But it’s no rocket science, it’s just a bandwidth strategy to meet the ever-increasing data transfer and network security needs. Burstable billing or also called as 95th Percentile billing is used in bandwidth calculation. This calculation is based on the peak usage by internet transit and peering networks. With the help of this plan, the bandwidth usage can exceed the contemporary threshold. One gets the desired bandwidth without even purchasing a higher CIR (Committed Information Rate) from your Internet Service Provider.

To deliver true colocation services a company needs more variables than a regular data center service provider. Thus they may require more IPs and a greater power supply. Burstable bandwidth is the only solution for such companies. Extended bandwidth brings a home solution to so many extraneous problems as well.

But the whole point is not about burstable bandwidth it’s about its billing procedure. This kind of billing allows the companies to pay a pre-determined amount for the internet bandwidth calculated on a monthly basis. There is no unnecessary financial penalty charged from your concerned Internet Service Provider. This is the beauty of burstable billing that even after the bandwidth spike no payment is issued apart from the contracted usage.

Advantages of burstable bandwidth

- Plans that work on burstable bandwidth help users to prevent their website from slowing down which is a usual practice while peak traffic.
- Allowing websites or applications to use more bandwidth than allowed by the respective hosting plan.
- Using the same connection line at such substantial costing saves a lot amount of money per month.
- It is so flexible that the same T1 bandwidth lines set themselves according to the requirement. When there is high traffic it makes use of its full capacity but as the traffic goes down the available bandwidth reduces accordingly.
- It intelligently sets its capacity and provides additional capacity only where there is redundant capacity.

Charging of burstable bandwidth

Generally, it is seen that burstable billing is done on 90-95% utilization of the network connection. That 5% or 10% is ignored to cover the needed capacity. No charging for exceeding the agreed usage. The below the bar usage is covered by that 95% or 90% which is below or equal to the agreed amount. Rest is for times of spikes in traffic that are bursting above the agreed rate. Some web server providers provide billing on the 90th percentile.

Although the charges are hard to predict sometimes but usually comes under the budget.