Questions about bandwidth, transfer limits and billing.

February 6, 2015 41.3k views
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By:
Lajamerr

I have a few questions, some technical and some billing.

  1. For each VPS what bandwidth(download and upload) are we guaranteed internally and externally(Barring peering issues and end-user bandwidth)?
  2. Do both downloading and uploading count towards the transfer limit? Is it a single transfer limit where downloading and uploading count or is there 2 transfer limits, one for downloading and one for uploading?
  3. When does the transfer limit reset? 28 days or 31 days from the creation of the VPS, 00:00 of the first day of the month.
  4. When the transfer limit resets does the unused transfer capacity rollover?
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5 Answers
lefthanpidsces June 15, 2015

Is there a way to check the current transfer amount? I.e. something that says I've transferred X GB so far and have Y GB left ?

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gparent February 6, 2015

  1. Nothing is guaranteed, due to the inherent way that networks operate. Your droplet is on a host with a 1 gbps Ethernet card which is shared between other droplets on that host.

  2. Only uploading counts.

  3. 1st of each month.

  4. No.

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  • ryanpq MOD February 6, 2015

    Just to clarify.. on #2. Your bandwidth used is the total of both incoming and outgoing traffic on the public network interface. Traffic on the private network is not counted.

    I should also note that we are not yet charging for bandwidth overage but will be in the near future.

  • Lajamerr February 6, 2015

    Was wondering if you could clarify on 1. Lets say one host can support 8 droplets. If all of them are downloading would they all get equal bandwidth(1000 Mbps / 8 = 125 Mbps for each droplet) Or is it possible some would get less than that even though in this scenario each droplet would have been able to get at least 125 Mbps from whatever service they are downloading / uploading to.

  • gparent February 6, 2015

    Ah, I thought I read somewhere that the traffic limit was only one way, my bad.

  • vps February 6, 2015

    I thought I read somewhere a year+ ago that bandwidth was billed for download only. Can't seem to find that now.

cube May 16, 2015

If I were to guess where these questions come from, it is the steep $0.02/GB ($20/TB) on overage. I think a lot of people, including myself, would prefer to buy additional transfer in bulk in advance at significantly reduced rates to avoid overage (e.g. $0.007/GB or $7/TB). I guess the question is, how much does it cost DO per TB transfer? For instance, a small $5/mo instance that suddenly gets a lot of transfer will result in a surprise bill at the end of the month. Someone might only need the $5/mo hardware option but lots of transfer for that instance (e.g. self-hosting a popular app that the person developed and published - they don't need a ton of RAM/CPU to host static content).

VPS.net has the "Power Pack" option, which goes from their default 3TB/node to "Unlimited". Whatever unlimited actually means, they don't really say and I also don't like their "temporary" additional nodes that comes with Power Pack - it's weird, gimmicky, and smelly to me. Data transfer is expensive and the server operator, not the person connecting to the box, is held responsible to pay for that. If attackers out there knew that, they would simply run up the bill by dragging out as much legitimate-looking traffic as possible over the wire without tripping any alarms.

Peace of mind is what people want. It is rather unsettling to know that someone can anonymously run up a bill because they feel like it.

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juanbp July 15, 2015

I have the same question as lefthanpidsces, I would like ot see what is the transfer amount I have left, but I coulnd't figure out how to get this.
Is there any way?

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vphreak August 27, 2015

I read some past posts saying that Digital Cloud wouldn't charge us for over usage on our transfer limit just because they couldn't provide us the interface to see how much we re using. Btw that post was from year 2013. Yes, I would want to know if we re going to be charged or not.. because I'm designing a magazine app server to host client's magazine and let iOS and Android app to download zipped file. I can always upgrade my droplet to increase bandwidth limits to save money. I have looked into CDNs.. they are expensive too.

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