Why do I have to pay for bandwidth at all?
Truth is that bandwidth is expensive.
Why?
Transmissing data from point A to B in a reliable way requires a lot of things to happen.
Maintenance - if something goes wrong there has to be a person to fix it.
Limited resources - There isn't infinite bandwidth available. Hence, people must 'pay' to use it.
No cost to transfer electrons - While you maybe right about the low cost of transferring electrons, it does consume 'some power'. Incrementally that amounts to significant costs.
Network upgrades - Networks and bandwidth must be constantly upgraded to keep up with demand. The research and development around it is supported by charging for bandwidth.
And more reasons that involves peering and multiple network providers from point A to B that demand their cut.
The following CloudFlare article on The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World can clarify it better than we do.
Seedbox Traffic Limits
Due to the costs of bandwidth, we are required to limit the the traffic each Seedbox.
The good news?
Each Seedbox plan comes with a monthly traffic quota included that resets every month:
Brisk plan – 20 TB / month
Fast plan – 20 TB / month
Quick plan – 20 TB / month
Stream Plan – 20 TB / month
Rapid Plan – 30 TB / month
Furious Plan – 30 TB / month
Swift – 10 TB / month
Supreme – 10 TB / month
(Full details in our pricing table).
If you do not require more than these limitations, that's great! 😃
What happens after I cross my monthly traffic limitation?
We are a very transparent company and do not have any intentions to include hidden costs.
In your client area, you have a transparent Seedbox Transfer pool so you can see what's your monthly traffic consumption any time you want.
Tip: By moving the mouse over the green bar you can get an exact percentage of usage.
Once you are reaching 100%, we'll start counting your extra traffic consumption and it looks as follows:
As you can see, moving the mouse on top of the red bar shows you how much extra traffic you have consumers this month which you will be charged against.
Fair usage policy
So how does this actually work?
Quite simple, we will throttle your account by reducing the service provided by us to 10Mbps incoming/outgoing traffic. So you would still be able to transfer, share, download files, just at this lower speed (meaning DATA TRANSFER is UNLIMITED).
Full speed of the service will be restored once renewal Invoice is generated.
Yearly subscriptions will be monitored on monthly bases, and only if they exceed the transfer included in their Seedbox plan, this fair use (throttle) policy will apply. Full speed of the service will be also restored at the same principal as for monthly subscription. But in this case annual subscribers will not have to wait for their renewal Invoice is generated, as speed will be restored 5 days ahead of their "monthly" period.
Just to make this one clear, IF annual subscription has started on 18th of the month, and dedicated full speed bandwidth is reached on 12th following month, that would activate speed throttle. And since all renewal invoices are generated 5 days ahead of due date, in case of this annual subscription, full speed would be restored on 13th (18 -5 = 13).
What's in if for you?
Think about it this way, this limitation is also scaring away abusive users who may clog the server your Seedbox is hosted on.
The result? better average traffic speeds across the board. 🚤
In addition, it allows us to continue investing back in our hardware, and the quality of the service.
I don't know what to do next...
If you need any assistance, let us know by opening a chat in the lower right hand corner of your screen. We're here to help 😄