December 7th, 2007
New Notifications
Today we’ve enabled a few notifications for Slicehosters. These are sent to the customer email addresses, not the billing email addresses.
Swap
The first notification is about swap usage. We’re monitoring pure I/O on each Slice’s swap partition, and if it exceeds our current threshold (subject to change) you’ll receive an email. This will hopefully let you know that the slice is using more swap than it should. This is bad because using excessive swap will degrade performance dramatically. You have a 3-day threshold to rectify the situation before you are emailed again.
We’ll follow up next week with some ways to tackle swap usage on your slice.
Blocklist
This monitor watches the IPs we provide on 2 Spam Blocklists with more to come soon. The email you receive gives a link to the Blocklist website. There you will find information on how to remove your IP(s) from that list.
Bandwidth Overage
You shall receive this notification the day you go over your bandwidth allotment. There is no change in service, but you will be charged an extra $0.30 (USD) per extra gigabyte of transfer.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM jaka
So this no longer applies?
— What if I go over my bandwidth amount?
Our bandwidth limits are soft caps. If you trickle over because your site is Dugg or Slashdotted, congratulations! We’re not going to hunt you down. If you consistently exceed your limit, we’ll warn you politely before taking action. If you anticipate excessive bandwidth and would like to plan for this, please let us know. Additionally, consider things such as mod_deflate to serve content more efficiently and maximize bandwidth.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Kevin
The FAQ reads:
What if I go over my bandwidth amount?
Our bandwidth limits are soft caps. If you trickle over because your site is Dugg or Slashdotted, congratulations! We’re not going to hunt you down. If you consistently exceed your limit, we’ll warn you politely before taking action. If you anticipate excessive bandwidth and would like to plan for this, please let us know. Additionally, consider things such as mod_deflate to serve content more efficiently and maximize bandwidth.
I signed up with the understanding that this was your overage policy. Will this new policy then only affect consistent offenders?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM slicematt
We handle it on a case by case basis.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM chrisfarms
cheers guys, I was running a script to monitor swap and free memory on my slices … so that’s one less thing to worry about!
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Placid
I’ve always wondered about Slicehost’s lack of unlimited-bandwidth offering. I know I’d personally jump at the chance if the cost was reasonable. How come you guys don’t offer this? Is it just a cost thing? Or are there more reasons such as logistics?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Jason W
Awesome idea, I love it.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM John K
For customers with multiple slices can we get a specific email pertaining to which host is over the bandwidth. Maybe a feature request for the specification?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM SuperJared
John, the bandwidth email lets you know which slice is over.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM tk
Please give us a clarification about this bandwidth thing. Your Terms of Service do not mention any overage charges. So when I go over bandwidth limit you can either
1) cease all traffic on my slice, or 2) let me continue to go over the limit with no overage charge and “warn politely” so we can agree on some plan. Reading your FAQ gives me impression that you’d choose action #2.
You can NOT automatically charge my credit card with overage charges with these Terms of Service, and I think this is good thing both for you and your customers. Your customers don’t need to worry about getting charged extra and this serves as a competitive advantage for you.
Of course if you have customers who know they need extra traffic, you can agree with them about overages. But this is a separate agreement.
Thanks, Satisfied customer using about 10% of his monthly bandwith
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM slicematt
Section 5 of the Terms of Service permits us to charge your card as needed.
Seriously, most people have nothing to worry about. 99% of the overages are on very large sites where they are well aware of bandwidth usage or someone who left a torrent on.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM tk
“Section 5 of the Terms of Service permits us to charge your card as needed.”
That section gives you right to charge card as needed for “any other charges you may incur in connection with your use of Slicehost services”, but it needs to be known what those charges are. Section 5 also tells that you will notify in advance when you increase your fees. Can this blog post be considered as such a notice?
I’d like to have an option to automatically get my slice suspended when my bandwidth limit gets exceeded to prevent accidental overage charges. I know I can’t go over my bandwidth allowance under normal circumstances but with these kind of overage charges it’s in theory possible to get a terrible surprise. It’s a question of principle and one of the reasons I chose Slicehost was lack of these overage charges.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Lee Joramo
Thanks for adding these email alerts.
How about adding a RSS feed to that lists these types of events as well?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM William
Do we get notified the instants we go over our bandwidth or anytime within a 24 hour period? I guess the real question is what the maximum amount of bandwidth is you can use in that time period. 10GB is $3, 50GB is $15. Does anyone know of a simple app that will keep track of my bandwidth and send me alerts at set usage points. In the past I have used vnstat but is doesn’t have alerts. Maybe there could be an option in slicemanager to send alerts at 80% BW usage
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Andreas
Finally after many weeks I’ve got my slice. I was impressed of the outstanding service and user comments about your company. And of course because you offered a “soft” overbandwidth policy.
Now my 12 month prepaid is processed thru my creditcard, the one month trial is over, and NOW, now you decide to charge me 0.30 USD if I become victim of a DDOS attack. Let us do the math:
Let’s say my slice is connected by 100 MBit (just multiply the horror with 10 if it is 1 GBit)
100 MBit are about 10 MByte possible traffic per second.
A day has 86400 seconds, so I’m able to produce 864 GB per day. That’s 259.20 USD.
So after 30 days I could theoretical owe you 7,776 USD or 77,760 USD if my slice would be connected by 1 GBit.
And then you tell us, you will handle it on a case by case basis, that means my neighbor slicer don’t have to pay 77,760 USD while I have to pay it, because my nose is not the right length.
Then you claim, “most people have nothing to worry about.”.
I say, EVERYONE with a working IP have to worry about, because the internet is FULL of evil people. You just need to disable your firewall and watch your “tail -f /var/log/auth.log”.
Seriously, you preserve the right to cancel the service without any reason at all. If you think, I misused your service just do this, but do not try to give the laywers an income, because you can be sure as hell, I would NEVER EVER pay for this overbandwith.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Si
Andreas: Chillax.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Chuck
Just a small thing, but now that the bandwidth limits are a little more real, perhaps the limit could be displayed on the slice manager in the “bandwidth” column?