Increasing bandwidth allowances may not be a bad thing to do

[GordonH]

Hello
In November we increased the bandwidth limits on our hosting plans by 100% (doubling them).
The reason for doing this was to make us look more competitive, plus we had 60% spare capacity anyway.
Clearly there was a risk that people would use lots more bandwidth.
Our actual bandwidth usage has risen by between 5 and 10%.

The negative result has been:

1. Fewer upgrades for bandwidth so less income from that source.


The positive results have been:

1. A general increase in sales during november by about 10 to 15% (but this does not account for the 50% increase this month).
2. Fewer annoying issues with people just going over their limit on the 30th of the month and us having to manually intervene to add more.

Therefore I can say that increasing the limits has been a success.
Our limits were quite low though compared to some companies.
Doing this might work for you.

[ldcdc]

Gordon, I must say that your posts here at HHO are among the ones I enjoy the most. You're so openly discussing things and there's a lot of value in what you say.

Thanks for sharing!

[tranz]

It would help if we knew where you started and where you ended up.

[GordonH]

Not sure what you mean.
Do you mean total overall usage, or what the limits were on the accounts before and after?
If you mean the plan sizes, then:

20MB went from 1GB to 2GB
50MB went from 2GB to 4GB
100MB went from 4GB to 6GB
200MB went from 6GB to 8GB
300MB went from 8GB to 10GB
500MB went from 10GB to 20GB
1000MB went from 15GB to 30GB

[Chicken]

Gordon, I must say that your posts here at HHO are among the ones I enjoy the most. You're so openly discussing things and there's a lot of value in what you say.

Thanks for sharing!
Gordon epitomizes the type of provider and he posts the type of threads/posts that I envisioned when starting this site. Hopefully, he'll rub off on many others.

[Rincewind]

I find that very few customers use that much bandwidth. I had one site that used 30Gb per month. Be excepting that, the average on my servers is just 350Mb per month. Not even one gig.

I think people over estimate the space and bandwidth they require these days. I can understand. When making a new it is very hard to estimate just how much you will use.

I'm surprised you saw any increase in bandwidth use. Increasing the bandwidth allowance of sites does not make the sites more popular so why would the bandwidth rise? Or are you only counting new customers in your figures?

[RiderMayBail]

I have found (the same as most of you probably), that rarely do most webmasters have any idea how much space/bw they actually need. They just want to go where they get more.

I recently did something similar on a trial basis for a select few clients, and noticed a couple of them actually went up in badwidth following this. I then asked them about the increased traffic, and it was due that they were previosuly worried about going over bandwidth, but when I upped it, they weren't as worried, and began hosting a couple of videos.

[GordonH]

I'm surprised you saw any increase in bandwidth use. Increasing the bandwidth allowance of sites does not make the sites more popular so why would the bandwidth rise? Or are you only counting new customers in your figures?

This is people whose sites would have been suspended on the 29th or 30th for going over their limit, now making it through to the end of the month.
Also, people having higher limits will add things to their sites that use more bandwidth.