Bandwidth Limiting Policies for Web Hosting?

Silas asks: "I run a small website development and hosting company. We're trying to develop creative, fair, but standard policies in limiting the bandwidth of our individual hosting accounts. I seek the opinions of Slashdot readers who have experience as hosting providers or hosting users. More details below. We're running Apache, and have pretty much decided on using mod_throttle as our bandwidth limiting technology. I know it's not everyone's favorite, but it looks great for us. We have less than 200 domains being hosted, all with varying degrees of bandwidth requirements. As you might suspect, we've got our own ideas and have done our own research about the answers to these, but now I'm interested in yours."

"The basic question is 'what's fair and standard' in these areas:

• Our two hosting packages offer 5 GIG/month and 10GIG/month respectively, with the option to upgrade in $5 per 1 GIG/month increments. Other hosting providers seem to be all over the board - what's the average hosting account want/need?
• The policy that seems common is 'allow a certain amount of data to go through in a certain time period, and then start rejecting requests until the end of the time period'. Is that fair? What policies do other hosts use? When is it appropriate to delay the response to a request instead of rejecting it?
• What should the user be able to do automatically in terms of upgrading/controlling their bandwidth usage? If a user is fine with 5 GIG/month but then gets slashdotted, what should their options be (right away, within 24 hours, etc.)?

We know we're not a powerhouse hosting company, and we know we can't compete with the big players in this industry, so please avoid comparisons/critiques based solely on price points, as we'll likely never be able to match the bulk hosters in that area. We're focused on excellent customer service and convenience to our design clients."

Comments

Throttling simply does not work

[Electrum]

We gave up on throttling. It just doesn't work. And not from a technical standpoint, either. If you are going to do throttling, then you need a web server that does real throttling. The only one I know of is Zeus. It does real throttling, letting you limit the total bandwidth for all of a user's sites to a bytes/sec value. No Apache modules do this. Even thttpd doesn't seem to get this right.

I assume that you want to limit bandwidth that your customers use because the bandwidth to your server(s) is limited (i.e. you don't have a 100mbit connect to the internet). In this case, Apache modules will not do what you want. Someone puts up a 10mb file. That file gets downloaded and uses up all of your outgoing bandwidth. While it is being downloaded, the Apache throttle module refuses other requests. This is obviously not what you want.

So suppose you end up using Zeus, or find some other way to do real throttling. Now what do you set the throttle speed to? 5gb over a month averages a little less than 2k/sec. Say you set it higher, like 20k/sec, and there are ten connections downloading that user's files (which can easily happen with certain browsers). What does the average clueless user or webmaster think? They don't understand throttling. They just think that the website is slow and that your service sucks.

We would throttle down user's sites when their bandwidth ran out. Customers did not understand that they had run out of bandwidth, even though they were notified via email. They just thought their sites were slow. We received a lot complaints about that.

We found that the best thing to do is to not throttle and to presell bandwidth cheap. Our different packages come with different amounts of bandwidth, ranging from 5gb to 180gb. After that, customers can purchase extra bandwidth (for $0.50/gb). Customers receive a notification via email when their bandwidth is running low and again when it is completely gone. When their bandwidth is gone, we redirect their sites to a page stating that they used up all their bandwidth.

This solution is simple and it works. Customers always know how much bandwidth they have left and can buy more at anytime. We never have to worry about users running up a huge bill and not paying it, since everything is prepaid.