[HCoop-Discuss] Surprise $2500 Bill For Bandwidth Overage @ Peer1

[Clinton Ebadi]

Greetings,

I had hoped to resolve this with Peer1 by now, but it has been two days
and they have ignored us, with only ten days left until they bill us so
I want to get this conversation started now in case they don't budge...

We managed to hit ~22Mbit/s 95th percentile at Peer1 during November,
which has resulted in our second every overage (last was at least five
years ago, and only 1Mbit/s...), and a surprise $2500 bill. We do NOT
have the funds to pay this, so are in a bit of a situation, and would
need some donations to cover it if they insist on charging us.

This was not directly caused by the transfers from peer1 to
digitalocean, those were completed in less than 12h. However, the apache
log local to afs sync cron was copying the same 1.5G error log from one
member every other hour for the rest of the month, which caused a very
small number of samples under the 95th percentile cutoff to be at
22Mbps. This was exacerbated by the poor port metrics in their portal
(same as they were in 2007 -- tiny low rest mrtg graph and average/max
transfer, all of which looked fine).

I am attempting to get them to overloook this overage since it is the
only time we've had this happen, and if I am interpreting the postage
stamp sized MRTG graph we have, it couldn't have been more than about an
hour of traffic that flipped us, and there is no way they incurred any
additional cost here. However, Peer1 was purchased by Cogeco a few years
ago and their billing department is a bit inhuman, and they may not
budge...

Just want to make sure others are aware, and that if they don't budge
we'll need to request donations next week... if it really comes to it, I
can likely cover anything other members can't, but it would be a *bit*
painful for me to spend what amounts to the cost of the hardware
upgrades we couldn't afford on nothing at all. And I really don't want
to think about the alternative--declaring bankruptcy and shuttering the
coop entirely--after spending eight months working to get us back to
permanent financial stability.

I will update as soon as I hear back from Peer1, I am trying to get them
to expedite and answer us tomorrow so we can figure out how to proceed.
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