Support - 95th Percentile Billing

Adhost colocation and dedicated customers are billed for monthly bandwidth usage using the 95th percentile method. All Adhost customers are given real time access to their MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) graphs that allow them to view their throughput in real time.

In 95th percentile billing, also known as burstable billing, the customer's data throughput is measured and recorded at five-minute intervals throughout the billing period. At the end of the billing period, the measurements are sorted from highest to lowest, with the highest 5% of usage (roughly a 36-hour period for a monthly billing cycle) discarded and not included in the bill. The peak of the remaining 95% of bandwidth utilization is used as the rate at which the customer will be charged for the billing period.

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In the example above, even though the customer's monthly traffic spiked at points up to 34.5 Mb/s of traffic, the customer would be billed at 18 Mb/s. This is due to the top 5% of the traffic - the brief spikes - being ignored, and the highest of the remaining 95% of throughput - at about 18 Mb/s - being used as the billing rate.

95th percentile billing is beneficial for the customer, in that it allows the customer bursts of peak throughput and traffic utilization without additional financial cost, as those short "bursts" of peak traffic are ignored, leaving the "normal" monthly usage to be billed.