Watching the Bandwidth Clock

Argh! Ever since I got the call about excessive bandwidth use I’ve been watching my use on the shaw secure site very carefully. It’s only the 12th and I’m already at 15 of the 20G I’m allowed before they come over here and beat me up with baseball bats. I was doing kinda ok but someone found something on the (now shut down till the end of the month) ftp site and started leeching. Urck. Maybe I should just upgrade to the higher level of account now. I have 5 gig for the next two and a half weeks. How do people survive?

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Category: Personal

7 Comments on “Watching the Bandwidth Clock”

  1. We pay companies for collocation of servers.
    Works exceedingly well and doesn’t have the site go down every time some damned fool hits the telephone pole your cable line comes in on… 🙂

  2. Co-location is great and all, but if you want to download stuff for a remote backup, or restore an ISO or DivX to CD/DVD, or stream some audio, then you’re still going to be using up the bandwidth 🙂
    Back in the day when I was telecommuting with dialup, I used two accounts. Both had 100 hours a month included for $30 or so, but every hour after that was a $1. So after 100 hours I would stop connecting as user1 and start using the hours from user2.
    I wonder if some similiar trickery could be done here? I’m sure you know lots of people that have Cable but don’t use anywhere near their limit…

  3. Well, since this is for my home system, it’s not really useful to go colo. What I really need is a T1 (ok, honestly an OC12) that has unlimited bandwidth.

  4. Ok, you peeked my interest. Where are you finding your bandwidth usage on the Shaw site? I’ve been looking around and have not found that stat, though I did find that I’m allowed 2 IP addresses through Shaw for free.

  5. I was told before when I got the call that as long as you keep it below 40 you are generally okay. The fellow told me that they start calling the worst offenders at the begin of the month and work backwards through the list. Of course at 117 gig you would be at or near the top of the list.

  7. You have to sign up at secure.shaw.ca (need your invoice and the serial# off th bottom of your modem) and when you do there is a “show my modem usage” link right there. Note that it is a pop up so you’ll have to allow pop ups for it to show up (this confused me greatly the first time).