[justizin]

Yeah, the $4k is kind of a manufactured figure, bandwidth expenses are particularly inflated, but it makes sense at smaller scale - if you have a $15/mo plan with 2TB of transfer and you go over 1TB, a few bucks penalty doesn't sound outrageous, and their cost is impacted by higher network management costs.

But, if you have a huge spike that wasn't really your fault, it doesn't cost them any more to write that off than it does the bandwidth that is consumed by a DDoS attack that is mitigated by a firewall.

When I worked at Rackspace, we hosted a very popular flash cartoon for one month after yahoo kicked them off the $5 hosting plan for pushing god knows how much bandwidth. They basically saturated a gigabit network port from a single server, and we sent them a bill for like a gajillion dollars. They went to another hosting company, of course, and I think got the bill down to something they managed to pay off.

Someone obviously had porsche-eyes, I thought it was kind of a shitty thing to do to the guys, who came to the office to make the voices of their characters for us and stuff.