Why do most hosts sell bandwidth in GB/month of data transfers rather than Mbps of peak usage? We also package bandwidth this way at ORCS Web. I can’t speak for everyone, I can only speculate. Some speculative potential reasons:
Many people would be surprised to hear that their site averages 200kbps. Ignoring that fact and stating that they have XGB/month in transfers sounds better.
It is much easier for a host to track GB/month per IP rather than continually recording, reporting, and graphing traffic flows for thousands of IP addresses.
Tracking and billing by GB/month smoothes peaks. A customer benefits if they have periods where their bandwidth flow spikes. Maybe they have a couple of bursts per day when their site is pulling 100Mbps (which in reality is a huge amount of bandwidth – almost 65 T1s!). They may have other times during the site’s off-hours that get almost no traffic. They probably wouldn’t want to subscribe to, and pay for, 100Mbps of high-quality redundant bandwidth if it was only used 5% of the time – that wouldn’t make the best fiscal sense. In this case paying per GB/month helps control costs by working through averages.
Bandwidth can be a tricky topic, and one rarely properly understood by clients – unless they have historical data on their applications. Expect more blog posts on this topic to help clarify some of the items.
~Brad