Hi Robert, It might be common, but I never heard of it. It seems absolutely NUTS to me. First, download bandwidth usage is the issue, not samples. You might want to introduce your provider to MRTG. Then you guys can come up with an agreement on the total amount of bandwdith you can use per month. And $400/MB over the agreement is insane. The only place I can imagine that type of inflation is the Weimar Republic :-) I pay $5/GB that I go over the agreed 100GB/mo. HTH, Tom Thomas W Shinder www.isaserver.org/shinder ISA Server 2004 Beta - Coming Soon ISA Server and Beyond: http://tinyurl.com/1jq1 Configuring ISA Server: http://tinyurl.com/1llp -----Original Message----- From: Robert [mailto:rzeff@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 12:53 AM To: [ISAserver.org Discussion List] Subject: [isalist] RE: 95th percentile reports http://www.ISAserver.org Here's how it works: Our upstream counts every bit of our traffic. Every seconds an average is taken. During a month's time, the top 5% (36 hours) of samples are thrown out. We are then billed on the highest sample, excluding the top 5%. In our case it is $400 per meg. Our connection is a 100Mbit port. If something went wrong we could get nailed with a huge bill. We have about 50 email acounts and a dozen low traffic web sites. Out 95th averages about 200Kbps = $80 / month. I am told that this is a common billing method. - Robert ------------------------------------------------------ List Archives: http://www.webelists.com/cgi/lyris.pl?enter=isalist ISA Server Newsletter: http://www.isaserver.org/pages/newsletter.asp ISA Server FAQ: http://www.isaserver.org/pages/larticle.asp?type=FAQ ------------------------------------------------------ Other Internet Software Marketing Sites: Leading Network Software Directory: http://www.serverfiles.com No.1 Exchange Server Resource Site: http://www.msexchange.org Windows Security Resource Site: http://www.windowsecurity.com/ Network Security Library: http://www.secinf.net/ Windows 2000/NT Fax Solutions: http://www.ntfaxfaq.com ------------------------------------------------------ You are currently subscribed to this ISAserver.org Discussion List as: tshinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send a blank email to $subst('Email.Unsub')