Question
How is bandwidth usage allocated?
- Posted on June 5, 2015
- DigitalOceanBilling
Asked by alastairwilliam
If I spin up 1TB transfer a droplet for a day, what would my bandwidth limit be? Would it be 1TB / 31 days or would it be 1TB? Or would it be 1TB, but the next droplet of the same type that I use would be pooled into the same 1TB of transfer? Or are all droplets pooled into the same 1TB of transfer?
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Hello, all
Droplets include free outbound data transfer, starting at 1,000 GiB/month for the smallest plan. Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01/GiB. For example, the cost of 1,000 GiB of overage is $10. Inbound bandwidth to Droplets is always free.
Any data transfer sent by a Droplet using a public network interface will count against the transfer pool for that Droplet’s account. All IPv6 traffic uses the public interface. Data transfer between Droplets over the VPC network uses a private network interface.
Transfer allowance is pooled cumulatively at the account level, not individually at the Droplet level. For example, if you run two Droplets for a full month, each with 1,000 GiB/month allowance, you accrue a 2,000 GiB allowance. Let’s say you transfer 1,500 GiB of data with the first Droplet, which is over its individual limit, and 100 GiB of data with the second Droplet, you would still be under the total limit of 2000 GiB by 400 GiB and would not be charged any overage fees.
Accrued transfer does not roll over between months and cannot be transferred between accounts or teams.
We collect usage data and display projections about your transfer pool, which you can view on your account’s Billing page.
Estimates are based on the assumption that the same daily averages for both the number of active Droplets and bandwidth usage will be maintained through the end of the month. Outbound data transfer and projected transfer allowance are updated once daily.
Billing alerts are triggered on the basis of actual usage, so projections of transfer in excess of the transfer pool will not trigger a billing alert until they are applied to the invoice.
You can check the full information on the Bandwidth billing here:
Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex
I also would like the answer to this. If it’s 1TB/31 then that gives you only 30G on the first day to set up your new instance but if it’s 1TB per instance then you could “cheat” the system by destroying and rebuilding your instance if you got close to your limit.
There is no clear clarification yet since DO has not yet implemented the over charging for bandwidth after you cross the allocated limit.
Usually the bandwidth is tied up with monthly billing cycle hence even if you spin your droplet on 25th of a month, you will get fresh 1TB allocation from 1st again with new billing cycle.
But till DO starts their extra bandwidth charging rule, we don’t have to worry about this.