How much can I peak without it costing money?

The highest 5% of the samples does not count. A month has over 8,600 of them, so you can sit above your commit for roughly 36 hours a month — a nightly backup, a release, a busy campaign day — without your 95th percentile moving at all.

What happens if I consistently exceed my commit?

Bursting is always allowed; the port is your only hard limit. If your 95th percentile ends the month above your commit, you pay for the excess or you we agree a higher commit together. No disconnections, no surprises afterwards.

Why do you not simply bill per gigabyte?

Per-GB billing punishes exactly the traffic the internet is meant for. A network is built for peak capacity, not for total volume — the 95th percentile reflects what your connection actually demands of the network, and charges you nothing for the rest.

95th percentile billing explained

Anyone reading a quote for IP transit or a data centre uplink for the first time runs into an odd term: billing on the 95th percentile. It sounds like statistics jargon, but it is one of the fairest billing models the networking world has — once you understand how it works.

How the measurement works

Your traffic is measured continuously: one sample every five minutes, both inbound and outbound. A month therefore produces over 8,600 samples. At the end of the month they are sorted from low to high, and then the important part happens: the highest 5% is discarded. The highest remaining sample — the 95th percentile — is what you are billed on.

That discarded 5% is not a trivial amount: it works out at roughly 36 hours a month in which your traffic may peak without counting. The nightly backup to another site, a product release, a spike because your campaign lands — it all fits inside that margin.

Picture it

Move the expected peak traffic around and watch what happens to the 95p line — the peaks stick out above it, but the line stays calmly underneath:

Bandwidth: how we bill

We bill on the 95th percentile: your traffic is sampled every 5 minutes and the top 5% of samples is discarded. Short bursts — a backup, a release — cost you nothing.

Expected peak traffic: 500 Mbps

With this profile your 95th percentile sits around ~325 Mbps — roughly where your commit would land, not at your peak.

This is precisely why your commit is almost always lower than your peak. Bill on the peak and you pay for the outlier of one busy hour; bill on the 95th percentile and you pay for what the connection actually carries day in, day out.

Why this model is fair

A network is sized for what has to pass through it simultaneously, not for the total number of gigabytes in a month. The 95th percentile therefore measures what your connection actually demands of the network:

Short peaks are free — bursting is what the port is there for;
Sustained use counts — if you run flat out all day, you are asking for that capacity all the time;
Predictable for both sides — you know what you pay, we know what we have to build.

Compare it with per-gigabyte billing (the model of many cloud providers): there, every byte costs money, including that one nightly backup. On the 95th percentile that same backup costs nothing, as long as it stays inside the burst margin.

What does this mean for your commit?

The commit is the bandwidth you lock in — you always pay for it, even in a quiet month, but in return it is guaranteed. The trick is to base it on your expected 95th percentile, not on your peak. Two rules of thumb:

Look at your traffic profile, not at your most anxious day. An office environment with a day/night rhythm has a 95p well below the peak; a streaming service running flat out around the clock sits right up against it.
Start slightly too low rather than too high. Bursting above your commit is perfectly fine; if your 95th percentile ends up consistently above it, you scale up. The other way round — a commit that is too high — means paying for thin air every month.

We bill on this model for our IP transit and for the uplinks with colocation. Unsure about your commit? The chart above is also in our quote form — enter your expected traffic there and we'll help you work out a commit that fits. And peaks? The first 36 hours of the month are free.