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

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Now how exactly does it relate to the question about bandwidth throttling? Why is it necessary for you to point out that your prices are not the best in the industry? How does your pricing strategy relate to bandwidth consumption control?

Simple solution

[infonography]

Wirecutters, you can reduce all sorts of bandwidth. Throttling just loses you customers who do want to grow.

Seriously, your a small outfit, if you meter the client's usage you can charge accordingly. Write it into the contract about how much you charge.

If you somehow get a spammer or a Warez site, they make themselves quite obvious if YOU AEW paying attention to bandwidth, have yourself paged when a user exceeds a certain amount and look at what they are doing.

If they got slashdotted, fine, but if your seeing a lot of SMTP going out or large files getting downloaded yank them quick. Upstream vendors don't care about what's coming into your sites, it's what's going out that they charge you on.

mod_throttle..

[stevey]

I tried to setup mod_throttle for a site where the requirement was 'No more than 1gig per hour'.

I actually found this incredibly hard to do, it's fine for slowing down the incoming requests when lots of them start coming in, but hard to make it keep track of total traffic served.

I think it should be fairly straightforward using the 'volume' directive, but I could never quite get it to work out properly.

My solution was mod_curb which is dedicated to just doing that. (It doesnt handle virtualhosts yet, but it will do by next weekend.