Maximum esp Blog 95th Percentile

If you've logged in and seen our new bandwidth UI, you've probably noticed a new piece of data labeled "95th percentile." One of the new features of the new bandwidth system is tracking bandwidth by megabits per second (mbps). For our higher bandwidth customers, this method can be used instead of tracking based on the total amount of data transferred.To gather this data, we take a sampling every five minutes which will give us a roughly 8,640 readings per month. We use this data to figure out how much of our pipe you are using and then bill you on that value. To get this reading, we take the 95th percentile of the data. This is also called Burstable billing.The 95th percentile gives us a value which roughly tells us that 95% of the time, the usage is below this amount. What we do is take all of the data we gathered up over the month and sort it. We then take the top 5% of the values and throw them out. The highest value that is left becomes your billable utilization.The advantage for the customer is that the peak values are thrown out. Many of our higher bandwidth customers use a steady amount of bandwidth, but periodically they need to burst up. Let's say, for example, every morning at 8:00 am you need to replicate many gigs of data from your local servers up to the web servers hosted at MaximumASP. This process only takes about 30 minutes. With burstable bandwidth, we'll allow you to get as much bandwidth as needed to accomplish this process as possible. And, as long as this temporary spike in traffic accounts for less than 5% of the total data, we won't penalize you.