Quick answer
What is 95th percentile bandwidth billing?
95th percentile bandwidth billing samples a port's rate in 5-minute steps, drops the top 5% of a month's samples and bills the highest one left. In a 30-day month, your busiest 36 hours are ignored. Ravenquay does not bill this way. Its 1 and 10 Gbit/s ports are unmetered, from $72.62 per 30 days. Renting one needs no KYC, and the balance is topped up in crypto.
What do the terms of 95th percentile billing mean?
- Sample
The average rate of a port over one fixed interval, usually 5 minutes, worked out from its byte counters.
- 95th percentile
The rate that 95% of the month's samples do not exceed. It becomes the billable rate for the whole month.
- Commit (CIR)
The committed information rate: the Mbit/s you agree to pay for every month, whether you use it or not.
- Burst
Traffic above the commit, up to the physical speed of the port.
- Overage
The part of the billable rate above the commit, charged per Mbit/s at a price set in the contract.
How is the 95th percentile worked out, step by step?
The method is simple arithmetic on a list of numbers. Here it is for a 30-day month.
Read the counters every 5 minutes
The router or switch reads the port's byte counters every 300 seconds. RRDtool, a common store for traffic graphs, uses 300 seconds as its default step.
Turn each interval into a rate
Divide the bytes counted in the interval by 300 seconds, then multiply by 8. The result is the sample, in bits per second.
Collect the month
A 30-day month holds 8,640 samples. A 31-day month holds 8,928, and February 8,064.
Sort the samples and drop the top 5%
Rank them from lowest to highest and remove the highest 5%. In 30 days that is 432 samples, or 36 hours of the busiest traffic.
Bill the highest sample left
The 8,208th sample is the billable rate. Below the commit you pay the commit; above it, you pay overage on the difference.
How are inbound and outbound traffic combined?
Each contract chooses one of three ways, because a port carries traffic both ways at once. The Wikipedia article on burstable billing lists them:
- Larger of the two per sample: take the higher of inbound and outbound for each 5-minute interval, then compute the 95th percentile.
- Larger of the two results: compute the 95th percentile of inbound and of outbound separately, then bill the higher one.
- Sum per sample: add inbound and outbound for each interval, then compute the 95th percentile of the totals.
The sum method bills a symmetric workload, such as a VPN gateway or a Tor relay, about twice as much as the other two. Ask which method a contract uses before you compare prices.
Worked example: when does a nightly backup raise the bill?
Take a server on a 10 Gbit/s port with a commit of 500 Mbit/s. Its ordinary traffic moves between 120 and 350 Mbit/s, day and night, and averages 220 Mbit/s. Every night, a backup job pushes 1.125 TB to another site.
The free allowance is 5% of the month: 432 samples, which is 72 minutes a day. Under 95th percentile billing, a burst is free for up to 72 minutes a day. At 75 minutes a day, it sets the rate for the whole month.
One backup job, five schedules, 30-day month, 500 Mbit/s commit
| How the 1.125 TB backup runs each night | Burst samples in the month | Billable 95th percentile | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 minutes at 2,500 Mbit/s | 360 | 350 Mbit/s or less | Pays the commit: every burst sample is in the discarded 5% |
| 70 minutes at about 2,140 Mbit/s | 420 | 350 Mbit/s or less | Pays the commit, with 12 samples to spare |
| 75 minutes at 2,000 Mbit/s | 450 | 2,000 Mbit/s | Billed 1,500 Mbit/s above the commit |
| 150 minutes at 1,000 Mbit/s | 900 | 1,000 Mbit/s | Billed 500 Mbit/s above the commit |
| Spread over 24 hours, about 104 Mbit/s more | 0 | 454 Mbit/s or less | Pays the commit |
A worked example on invented traffic, not a measurement and not a price list. Each row moves the same 1.125 TB per night, about 33.8 TB in the month.
Two lessons follow. Duration matters more than speed: 60 minutes at 2,500 Mbit/s costs nothing extra, while 75 minutes at 2,000 Mbit/s does. Spreading the same data across the day keeps every sample low.
The month in the 75-minute row moves about 105 TB in total. A plan with a monthly quota would count those 105 TB. An unmetered port counts nothing; its only limit is its speed.
Why do carriers and hosts bill by the 95th percentile?
It lets a customer go above the commit for short periods without paying for a higher committed rate. The Wikipedia article on burstable billing notes the method is common between companies that exchange traffic, and less common at consumer ISPs.
For the carrier, the 95th percentile tracks the capacity a customer really occupies at busy times. A monthly byte total does not: 100 TB sent evenly loads a network far less than 100 TB sent in one weekend.
95th percentile billing charges for your busiest sustained hours, not for the terabytes you move.
Is 95th percentile billing cheaper than a TB quota or an unmetered port?
It depends on the shape of your traffic. Steady traffic with short spikes does well under the 95th percentile. Long, heavy bursts do badly.
Three ways to pay for bandwidth
| Method | What is counted | What sets the bill | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 95th percentile | 5-minute rate samples | The busiest rate left after 5% of samples are dropped | Bursts longer than 72 minutes a day; how in and out are combined |
| Monthly TB quota | Bytes, often outbound only | The fixed price, plus any overage past the quota | What happens past the quota: a bill, a slowdown or a suspension |
| Unmetered port | Nothing for billing | The fixed price of the plan | The port speed, and every clause in the terms |
A quota converts to an average speed: one terabyte over 30 days is about 3.09 Mbit/s. The full conversion, with protocol overhead, is on how many TB per month a 1 Gbps port can transfer.
Does Ravenquay bill by the 95th percentile?
No. Ravenquay rents each server for a fixed price, paid in advance from a crypto balance for a 30-day, 3-month, 6-month or 12-month term. Its traffic rule reads:
Unmetered means no monthly traffic quota and no overage bill: the port speed of your plan, 1 or 10 Gbit/s, is the only limit. Each server has one dedicated IPv4 address and an IPv6 /64.
Ravenquay counted 229 comparable dedicated plans at no-KYC crypto hosts on 30 October 2026: 89 were unmetered, and every other one listed a monthly quota in terabytes.
The three berths and their prices are on the Ravenquay pricing page. Market prices for 10 Gbit/s ports are on how much 10 Gbps dedicated server hosting costs. How hosts word their own limits is on the 10 Gbps fair-use page.
What else do people ask about 95th percentile billing?
How many hours are free under 95th percentile billing?
36 hours in a 30-day month, 37.2 hours in a 31-day month and 33.6 hours in a 28-day month. That is 72 minutes a day on average.
How do you calculate the 95th percentile of bandwidth in Excel?
Put one 5-minute rate per row for the month, in Mbit/s. Then use =PERCENTILE.INC(A1:A8640, 0.95). Spreadsheet functions interpolate between two samples, so the result can differ slightly from a carrier's sorted-list method.
Is the 95th percentile the same as the average?
No. The average divides the total by the time. The 95th percentile ignores quiet hours entirely and looks only at the busiest 5% boundary, so it is usually much higher than the average.
What happens if I never reach my commit?
You still pay the commit. It is a minimum: the bill is the commit or the 95th percentile, whichever is higher.
Can a 10 Gbit/s port be billed at the 95th percentile?
Yes. The port sets the ceiling and the commit sets the floor. Sustained bursts above the commit for more than 36 hours a month raise the bill toward the port speed.
Sources (3)
- Burstable billing — Wikipedia (read 2026-11-01)
- rrdcreate: the --step option (default 300 seconds) — RRDtool documentation (read 2026-11-01)
- Prefixes for binary multiples — NIST (read 2026-11-01)