Cellar moving again, outage pending

[Undertoad]

The Cellar will be unavailable on Friday 2/17, from approx. 11am to approx. 2pm. At that time it will be on the fastest, bestest connection it has ever been on. It will also be more expensive than ever, but not the crazy price I would have to pay if I stayed with the current provider (Netreach/neonetix/nntx).

It is not unfair google fodder to say that Neonetix seriously lost it with their business plan. The evidence is here, for those geeky/interested:

http://www.nntx.net/Services/CoLocation.asp

This page describes the pricing for placing a server in Netreach/neonetics server room. The key figure is "Throughput (monthly max)". You notice that, at the $150 "enhanced" rate, the maximum throughput you can get is "30Gb". The lower-case b, it turns out, is important.

It indicates that your maximum throughput is 30 gigabits. The problem here is that every other provider on the net lists that figure in gigaBYTES.

If you've taken CompSci 101 you might recall that there are 8 bits in a byte. It's a little worse than that, because the traffic that's measured in bits includes bits dedicated to controlling the protocol. So let's say the difference between a GB and a Gb is ten-fold.

Therefore, by making that b lower-case, Netreach/neonetix set its monthly limits at a point where the Cellar, at the $150/month package, reached the limit in 2 days.

20 days would not have surprised me. But if a simple forum maxes your "enhanced" package out in 2 days, your business plan is hosed.

Now look at the "additional bandwidth" pricing at the bottom of the page. They insisted that the $595 price for 1.5mb/sec is their price for unmetered bandwidth, not affected by the monthly max. So the actual retail price to me, for three servers, would be $775/month.

The competition offered me $389/month for three servers at 10mb/sec unmetered.

Again, either $775 for 1.5mb/sec unmetered, or $389 for 10mb/sec unmetered.