Too much transfer, any advice?

V

Vpower

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Mar 11, 2004
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Oslo/finnmark, Norway
Hi,

I believe I have somekind of problem here, but don`t understand what?
I have a server at 15minuteservers.com.

15minutes says that I`ve used 115GB transfer 2 months in a row.
"That`s the data on your bandwidth usage this billing period. If you look at a past invoice, 432244, you`ll see 115 gb used from 8/11 to 9/11. 437848, 9/11 - 10/11, also 115gb."

DA shows 0,8GB for this month for all domains.
15minutes says.
"The Direct Admin monitoring is not accurate, We believe that it only monitors web traffic. Our monitoring monitors all traffic."

How can I have over 114GB worth of other traffic than web traffic this month?
You can find mrtg stats at www.polarweb.net/mrtg
How can I find out where the traffic goes?

Thanks :)
 
You could be using that much traffic if your system was a spam relay.

But it's probably not, since you'd know about it because you'd be on a lot of blocklists.

In order to use 115G of traffic every much you'd have to be averageing about 350kbps all the time.

You're not.

15minuteservers is probably having a problem with their monitoring.

Ask them to show you the proof.

Show them your mrtg data and how low it is, and ask them how to reconcile all that traffic.

Jeff
 
Here is dump from mrtg which I got from my NAC customer care account.

Here is part of raw dump:

Data For Dedicated ID : 2433
Period From : 10/30/2004
Period To : 11/30/2004
Samples taken this period : 8,287
Percentile to be used : 100th


We will be examining sample number 1.

Inbound 100th percentile usage : 161,365
Outbound 100th percentile usage : 3,076,638
Bytes Transferred Inbound : 1,098,973,678
Bytes Transferred Outbound : 10,427,762,348

Avg Throughput Inbound : 3,389
Avg Throughput Outbound : 31,609

Not the 115GB they said.. I`ve sent them an email, 17 hours ago, but no reply yet.. Not that this is that urgent..
 
Let's start at the beginning:

Are they billing you for 100th percentile usage, or just using it to figure the average usage?

Never use a data center that charges you 100th percentile usage, as it will result in you being charged for the maximum being used at any one time they check, even if the rest of the time you only use one tenth of that data. 95th percentile is industry-standard for billing.

If they were using 95th percentile billing then they'd throw out the highest 414 samples, which would be a more reasonable as an approximation of what you're really using.

But if they're using 100th percentile checking to create an average, that's reasonable.

They're checking your account roughly once every six minutes.

I'm not sure what they mean by Bytes Transferred because you can't determine Bytes Transferred by an mrtg sample in bits per second. Perhaps it's an average for the month determined by the samples. That's reasonable.

If your outbound traffic is averaging 3,076,638 bits per second, and if that number is sustained, then you're averaging approximately 3 megabits per second.

3 megabits per second is approximately 1 Terrabyte of transit per month.

Which they're not saying you're doing.

So what does the Bytes Transferred mean? Does it mean an average based on their sample? Are they billing you on true average converted to bytes per month? That's a reasonable billing method.

10,427,762,348 bytes per month? Or per six minutes? Or per some other period?

If per month, then you're doing approximately 9.7 Gig of transit out and about 1 Gig of transit in, per month, for a total of about 10.7 gig of transit.

If per six minutes, then you're doing 107 gigs per hour.

Neither makes sense. I think the number is per month and they've got a misplaced decimal in their math.

There are people out there who's entire business is analyzing transit billing data for errors; it's that common.

Of course if your system has been compromised it's possibly it's moving a lot of data not shown in the logs.

Good luck.

Jeff
 
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