Safe from financial ruin
One of the big worries I have had since I colocated this machine is the fear of doing something that will get noticed. You know, something cool that might get noticed on /. (yeah, right) or someone else putting up something for download that gets popular.
I only pay for 256kbps (kiloBYTES per second, not bits) of bandwidth, and I am charged accordingly. If I go over that amount for any significant amount of time then the bandwidth bills will add up very, very quickly. We have friends in Santa Monica that learned that lesson the hard way.
So, tonight I finally got around to implementing traffic shaping on this machine. My bandwidth is burstable, so short bursts over 256kbps are ok, but long amounts of traffic above that speed are not. Using the /sbin/tc command on my machine I’m managed to make it so that bursting traffic (images, etc.) are sent very quickly, but larger files are not. Now I can finally do backups without worrying that I’ll bankrupt myself.
In case you are interested, the /sbin/tc command was put into /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and it is:
/sbin/tc qdisc add dev eth0 root tbf rate 235kbps latency 50ms burst 15400
So, all you people whom I host, you need no longer fear bankrupting me with your digital ways.
As if you were worrying in the first place.
October 9th, 2005 at 8:22 am
Send me the bill. I’m really sorry…what did I do this time?
October 9th, 2005 at 10:44 am
Oh, you didn’t do anything.
What is interesting to me is the fact that it would be trivial for the hosting company to implement this; they have tiers of service, they simply have to put the customer computer on a virtual LAN that implements the appropriate traffic shaping configuration.
But that might prevent them from getting revenue, so…
October 9th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Oh, did you mean the time Grace got hit with a $1,000 bill for bandwidth? Yeah, that sucked mightily.
October 9th, 2005 at 11:51 pm
Yes, that was it exactly. That will not be happening here.
October 10th, 2005 at 6:07 am
so we’re free to put up the porn and mp3 collection now?
October 10th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Yay, porn!
October 10th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
Sorry, Sir. No porn for you, one year!!
October 11th, 2005 at 8:04 am
You darned porn nazi!
October 13th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
I’m more of a porn socialist. I like to be very social with porn stars.
WOMEN porn stars, you sick monkey.