[ On Thursday, April 19, 2001 at 16:07:37 (-0400), Martin Hannigan wrote: ]
Subject: Re: What does 95th %tile mean?
Isn't in+out a more fair representation of usage? I've always assumed that this was the standard to be honest. Thank god I'm not the billing person. I think Exodus does in+out.
Either (in+out) or MAX(in,out) should be an equally fair measure of usage, at least from the customer's perspective. The difference is in the pricing, and if both the customers and the vendors are not equally aware of the particular computation used by each other then it's impossible to know what's competetive and what's a rip-off (accidental or otherwise). That's true of any form of usage-based billing too -- i.e. for either bulk throughput pricing (octets per period), or Nth percentile pricing. Some ISPs have un-balanced in/out loads though and those that do can usually afford to sell whichever they've got in surplus at a lower price. A wise ISP might attract more wise customers by offering separate pricing strucutres for in and out traffic, or they might offer "free" services in whichever direction they can (eg. a primarily access-only provider offering to host mailing lists, FTP archives, etc.; or hosting providers offering to provide access POPs for charity groups, etc.). -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <woods@robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>