How Xenion sells traffic
We're not going to lie to you - buying international transit in Australia is expensive. Its not as expensive as it was a few years ago - where a megabit of transit would cost you upwards of two thousand dollars! But hosting providers today seem to charge the same traffic rate whether you're using a small or large amount of traffic.
How traffic is bought and sold
Hosting and Internet providers buy traffic based on how big their pipe is. This pipe may be small (a megabit), or may be hundreds of megabits in size. The price is the same regardless of how much traffic is used - so it's in the best interest of the provider to utilise the pipe as highly as possible.
Unfortunately this presents a problem - home broadband/cable generally uses traffic during the evening and not the day whilst hosting sites may find their peak traffic use during the day. Providers need to buy enough transit to meet the peak demands without any performance loss and then "eat" the costs on the unused traffic during quiet times.
So the pricing is generally set at or near the peak rate - if you use traffic during off-peak times then you'll generally pay the same amount as on-peak. This has changed somewhat in the broadband market but it hasn't caught on with the hosting market.
In essence, you end up paying more for each gigabyte of traffic your hosted site sends to maintain that extra "peak" which you may use once a week, once a month, or almost never. Large sites aren't bothered by this as they're already able to access bulk pricing and discounts from their hosting providers, but this doesn't help the smaller customers cover their traffic fees.
The Xenion Difference: Network Traffic the Right Way
Xenion has introduced a three-tiered traffic model - 'normal', 'premium' and 'excess'. This allows hosting sites with modest bandwidth requirements get what they need - internet access at an affordable price. Peaks are dealt with by modern traffic engineering and quality of service to ensure your customers get top performance without you having to pay through the nose for it.
- Normal traffic (assuming ~ 80% traffic utilisation with ~20% peak): $2.20 per gigabyte
- Premium traffic (assuming ~40% traffic utilisation with ~60% peak): $8.80 per gigabyte
- Excess traffic - free; but shaped depending upon bought traffic amount and VM size. Traffic shaping will only occur on links that are congested by customers who haven't used their traffic quota.
- Bulk traffic: $475 a megabit for transit; non-shaped WAIX matched megabit-for-megabit
Don't pay for excess traffic you don't control
You pay for your traffic up front each month. If you approach your limit then you're warned - if you go over your limit you're warned again. Your site isn't then cut off and you don't incur any extra fees. The bandwidth allocated to your site is just reduced slightly - your customers can still access your site but they won't be able to download large files at a quick pace. And face it; if you have one of those traffic spikes where suddenly hundreds of people want to download a single file off your site wouldn't you be better off being able to limit that? It might cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars in traffic fees with a traditional provider.
If you do go over your limit and need more traffic, with one call to Xenion we can add more traffic to your monthly quota to overcome your shaping as required and you're good to go! You don't have to pay for the traffic that you've used whilst shaped; only the traffic you'd like to be unshaped from that time forward. You decide when you wish to pay for excess traffic, not your hosting provider.
Handling Traffic Peaks
Additionally, if you think your site will have peaks at certain times when your demand exceeds your normal traffic patterns then you can pay for 'premium' traffic. The premium traffic is then used during your designated peak period allowing you to peak at a much higher throughput than the normal traffic rate. Xenion understands your business may not fit a normal "daytime busy" or "evening busy" model so you can choose any time during any days of the month as your peak period. You can even schedule this up to a week in advance - let Xenion know before your new product release and we'll assign you more bandwidth temporarily.
How to do More with Less
Xenion has over ten years experience in optimising content delivery to use the minimum bandwidth necessary to produce the maximum speed and customer satisfaction. We can help you with your site design and maintainence to allow browser and web caches around the world do what they do best - save you money and make your site faster.