Question
Any way to cap after reaching transfer limit to prevent high bandwidth bills?
- Posted on December 8, 2020
- Billing
Asked by willemDolphin
I stubbled several topics here in the community where users had ridiculous high traffics reported for their cheap 5$ VPS. Amounts like 100$ and 250$ for using excess of data.
I started to search, if there is an option to cut off or limit my VPS bandwidth as soon as my monthly datalimit is reached but could not find this.
Because I know that my VPS should never have a high bandwidth as I manage a server for IoT devices for multiple companies. What are my options to cap my bandwidth as soon as I hit the limit for Ubuntu Server?
I do best practices with security, but still I can never be sure if someone some day highjack my server and consuming hundreds of dollars of bandwidth.
I do found (and enabled) the option to get a email notify as soon as there is a lot of out-bound bandwidth transferred but I do notice that this might be to late when I read the email notify and be able to take action to such a notify.
Someone else in a topic was recommending OVH cloud as they automatically cap your bandwidth to 10mpbs as soon as you reach the limit until you take action to buy more space. As I am already comfortable (and happy) with digital ocean, I do not prefer that route. I hope for a option with digital ocean or a software solution inside my Ubuntu server.
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At the moment there is no way to cap bandwidth usage automatically. As you stated you can setup billing alerts which will notify you when your usage for the current period exceeds the amount that you specify, but it may not be ideal for your intended usage as you have already mentioned.
Alternatively, if you receive a very small amount of traffic you can use firewall rules to limit your overall throughput at any period to say 1Mbps, which would be well below the allotted bandwidth amount of even the smallest plan.