How is my bandwidth charge calculated?

Bandwidth is billed on 95th percentile usage. Bandwidth measurements are taken every 5 minutes and recorded. During the course of the billing period we record the measurements taken and provide you a graph where you can monitor your bandwidth usage. At the end of the month we throw out the top 5% of the measurements, and your 95th percentile bandwidth usage is the largest remaining measurement.

How is 95th percentile usage different that monthly transfer charges?

Many web hosting companies bill for bandwidth based on how much data your site transfers. Each http request is logged and the number of bytes transferred is recorded. At the end of the month the log files are analyzed and the total transfer is calculated. Your charge at the end of the month is the number of megabytes (or gigabytes) transferred multiplied by the cost the hosting company charges per megabyte. The main difference between this type of billing and the 95th percentile method is that this method charges you for all your transfer, where as the 95th percentile method allows you periods of free transfer during the course of the month.

How does server load balancing work?

Central Host utilizes high performance hardware load balancing equipment to perform wire speed (100Mbps +) distribution of http traffic across a group of 2 or more web servers. Each dedicated server account comes with two physical web servers, which we maintain on the behalf of our clients. Under normal operation the load balancer distributes traffic equally across each server, should one web server fail our load balancer will dynamically redirect traffic to the remaining active server.

Also we provide manual control over the load balancer so that you can control which of your dedicated servers is handling requests for your web site. This is tool has several uses:

1. Performing quality assurance on the site before it goes live on.
2. Performing content releases at a specific time.
3. Updating your web site or making changes in a zero down time fashion.

How can I manage content between my dedicated servers?

Each of your web servers is equipped with an FTP server so you can upload content to each server.

ftp://www1.mydomain.com/

ftp://www2.mydomain.com/

You are responsible for ensuring that the content data is identical across all of your web servers. If you are not sure that you have identical content on both servers you can use the server synchronization tool provided with your account to copy content between servers.

How are virtual domains handled?

With each dedicated server you can have an unlimited number of virtual domains. This allows you to host web, ftp, smtp, pop, and imap services for many sites on the same server.