
How to Choose a Service Provider for Colocation - Part III
Very important factors in choosing a service provider are also the speed of the network connection and the pricing of the data volumes transmitted per month. Additionally, various additional services that come with the connection, such as DDos protection and IP address fields. Often, these are packaged/priced differently by service providers and often misunderstood. This can significantly affect the cost and, especially, the quality of the service.
Using Network Services. Connection Speed and Data Volumes.
To start with, a little about units of measurement again. The speed of the network port is measured in megabits (Mbit/s or Mb/s). This shows how much data can be moved through the port allocated to you per second. These same megabits are represented in both the data center and home internet connections. Common home connection speeds are 20, 40, 100Mb/s.
In some data centers, 100 Mb/s network ports are still used as the default connection speed. 1 and 10 gigabit (Gb/s) ports come with a significant additional cost. Since network traffic, like power consumption, has peaks, a 100Mb/s connection is a serious bottleneck with today's data volumes according to WaveCom. Therefore, we offer 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, or even 40Gb/s ports, where you can reach the port's nominal value if needed. For clients with the capability to use it, we also offer redundant ports connected to different segments of our network. Such a BGP solution mixes the networks of two different internet providers. This can be seen as high availability for net traffic.
In addition to the throughput speed of the network port, volume-based pricing is also used. Here you can draw parallels with everyday life - specifically mobile phone packages. The speed of the mobile internet connection is analogous to the speed of the network port in our analogy. Similar to mobile data limits, data volumes are usually priced in data centers as well.
Volume pricing, or bandwidth, is handled differently by different service providers. Broadly speaking, there are three options.
Pricing based on the nominal value of the port. Unlimited volume
At first glance, this seems like a completely good solution. Who wouldn't want an unlimited volume connection? However, as always, the reality is a bit more complicated. If you have, for example, a 100Mbit unlimited volume connection, you will face serious problems if the network traffic temporarily exceeds the 100Mbit limit. During peaks, additional traffic simply cannot pass through this network port, resulting in packet loss. The solution is a much more expensive 1Gbit connection, which now mostly sits idle. Therefore, you pay a lot of money for a connection that you might never need.
Unlimited volume connections are best suited for clients whose network traffic is consistently high with few peaks. Such connections are also available at WaveCom with 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s speeds.
Volume pricing (billing) in terabytes. Should you choose 10TB or 100TB per month?
This approach is similar to mobile packages' data volumes. To make things a little less simple, data volume is expressed not in bits but in bytes. Unlike mobiles, here the data volumes are significantly larger and are measured in terabytes instead of gigabytes. One byte with a capital "B" contains 8 bits with a small "b". Therefore, a 100Mb/s (megabit) network port can handle only 12.5MB (megabytes) per second at maximum load.
WaveCom's server hosting service includes 10TB of data by default. This means that the average network traffic of all servers per month should be a maximum of 30 Mb/s. If your average network traffic exceeds this limit, you will receive a small additional bill for the exceeded terabytes. Each additional TB costs 4 euros per month. If you increase your commitment to 20TB, each TB costs 3 euros per month. Here, you need to look at the actual data volume to see which scenario is more cost-effective for you.
Remember that WaveCom does not limit the network port speed to 100Mb/s but provides 1 or 10 Gb/s ports. This means that the quality of your service does not suffer during traffic peaks. Peaks are a billing issue and do not affect your clients' service usage. Note that 95% of clients find 10TB to be completely sufficient. Such volume pricing is best suited for clients with lower network traffic.
95th percentile, burstable billing
This initially somewhat cryptic and hard-to-translate term hides the third volume pricing option. Burstable billing is a method of measuring data volume introduced due to network traffic peaks. It allows you to temporarily exceed a set threshold (e.g., 1Gb/s unlimited burstable to 10Gb/s) without having to pay for the larger data volume. Most service providers use a five-minute time window and 95% usage for data calculation. This means that for five percent of the time, you can use a faster connection but do not actually have to pay for it. You pay for the connection used during the remaining 95% of the time.
The 95% billing works as follows. You start with a certain commitment, for example, 1Gb/s unlimited volume for 250 EUR/month. Each exceeded megabit costs 0.3 EUR/month. So, if you reach 2 Gb/s, you would have to pay an additional 300 euros. At this point, it would be better to increase the commitment to 2 Gb/s, as it costs only 500 EUR/month in total.
This is an ideal package for clients with high network traffic who also experience peaks. The solution allows you to temporarily exceed your assigned data volumes without paying a cent. WaveCom offers 1, 2, 4 Gb/s burstable to 10 Gb/s data volume packages.
IP Address Prices
One factor that may not be immediately considered is the price of IP addresses. However, if you need a larger number of IP addresses to run your service, there can be significant differences in pricing between different service providers.
With WaveCom's hosting service, we provide you with 3 usable IP addresses for free. Additional IP addresses are significantly cheaper with us compared to competitors.
DDoS Attack Protection
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack involves overwhelming the target with requests, making it temporarily unavailable. A very important factor in choosing a service provider is the presence or absence of DDoS attack protection.
Without a proper protection mechanism, your service will become unavailable. Additionally, a large portion of the data volume allocated to you will be consumed. It is important to remember that the attack may not even be aimed at your service. If another client in the data center or the service provider itself falls victim to a strong attack, it will significantly affect your service if there is no proper DDoS protection. Therefore, it is essential to choose a service provider that offers this protection.
While DDoS protection is usually a paid add-on service (400-500 EUR/month) with competitors, it is built into WaveCom's hosting service. The systems constantly monitor the network, quickly identifying possible attacks and responding to them using modern methods. When an attack is detected, control is taken over, directing malicious traffic to filtering servers or routers where the traffic is cleaned. The clean traffic is then directed back to the client's IP address.
Our free standard package offers automatic traffic limiting, blocks known volume-based attacks and ICMP packets. It provides 15 minutes of invaluable free protection after an attack is detected.
We also offer a customizable Premium package, suitable for anyone who wants more granular control over protection measures. This includes custom protection policies, white- and blacklisting options, and Geo-IP-based filtering to meet your specific needs.
You can read more about WaveCom's DDoS protection service here: https://wavecom.ee/automaatne-ddos-kaitse-teenus
In summary, when hosting servers with a service provider and choosing the right service, there are many challenges, and it is worth following the various aspects discussed in our blog post series to make the best choice. These include:
- What is the technology and quality of the service provider's data center?
- Is there sufficient redundancy in the data center components?
- Is the data center adequately certified, i.e., are the necessary certificates in place?
- How is power consumption priced?
- What is the speed of the network port to which the devices are connected, and is there an additional charge for a faster connection?
- Is this speed sufficient for your data volumes?
- How much data volume is included in the price, and how is additional volume charged?
- How are IP addresses priced, and is there DDoS protection?
If you have any questions or need advice in choosing the best solution, the professional team at WaveCom is here to help. Since 2011, we have had professional experience in the field of data centers (including their design and consultation) and in hosting clients' solutions.
Interested – contact us.
Table of Contents
Part I - Introduction
Part II - Electricity
Part III - Network Connections