Afrihost Query?

@davemc
- Make sure its not because its prorated. May give u slightly less because of that system.

@AfriHost-Gian

Is the system implemented that way because you guys buy per gig from IS? i.e you guys control the capping not IS?
 
@ MrG - that is correct. We control the capping and we pay IS on a per GB basis.
 
@MrG
- I paid R84.19 for the 3GB package which is priced at R87.00, so I guess I got some prorated deal that I have yet to fully comprehend.

Oh wait ... I think I get it ... 9 hours of the day had already moved on before I ordered the package, so the price is R87.00 - 9 hours.

I am having a slow day, have patience!

:D
 
davemc said:
@MrG
- I paid R84.19 for the 3GB package which is priced at R87.00, so I guess I got some prorated deal that I have yet to fully comprehend.

Oh wait ... I think I get it ... 9 hours of the day had already moved on before I ordered the package, so the price is R87.00 - 9 hours.

I am having a slow day, have patience!

:D
Click to expand...

correct!
 
@Gian:

In your response, you are sending the proverbial straw man up in flames. We all like - very much so - what you have done shaking down the ADSL prices the way you did, but your explanation as to why you charge for run-on bandwidth usage instead of hard-capping it, is contrary even to your own terms of service - from which I quote verbatim but for the original usage figures:

[...] "We calculated that you have a total of 1 GB bandwidth (including all of your additional TopUp Bundles purchased) available for this period and have used a total of 1 GB so far.

What does this mean for you?

Once you have reached 100% your account will become unusable until the 1st of next month. To avoid having your account suspended, please login to your Client Zone and purchase a TopUp Bundle." [...]

It looks as if you are quite willing to introduce such changes on the fly - all of which are not necessarily good or welcome. Changing tack this easy does bode ill for the future. Personally, I prefer to be hard-capped once my monthly bandwidth allocation has been reached.
 
BroadSide said:
@Gian:

In your response, you are sending the proverbial straw man up in flames. We all like - very much so - what you have done shaking down the ADSL prices the way you did, but your explanation as to why you charge for run-on bandwidth usage instead of hard-capping it, is contrary even to your own terms of service - from which I quote verbatim but for the original usage figures:

[...] "We calculated that you have a total of 1 GB bandwidth (including all of your additional TopUp Bundles purchased) available for this period and have used a total of 1 GB so far.

What does this mean for you?

Once you have reached 100% your account will become unusable until the 1st of next month. To avoid having your account suspended, please login to your Client Zone and purchase a TopUp Bundle." [...]

It looks as if you are quite willing to introduce such changes on the fly - all of which are not necessarily good or welcome. Changing tack this easy does bode ill for the future. Personally, I prefer to be hard-capped once my monthly bandwidth allocation has been reached.
Click to expand...

Is your complaint about the minor over usage allowed due to timing differences between getting the info from IS and actually capping the account? I do not think it is unreasonable for Afrihost to do this or in fact contrary to their terms and conditions
 
BroadSide said:
@Gian:

In your response, you are sending the proverbial straw man up in flames. We all like - very much so - what you have done shaking down the ADSL prices the way you did, but your explanation as to why you charge for run-on bandwidth usage instead of hard-capping it, is contrary even to your own terms of service - from which I quote verbatim but for the original usage figures:

[...] "We calculated that you have a total of 1 GB bandwidth (including all of your additional TopUp Bundles purchased) available for this period and have used a total of 1 GB so far.

What does this mean for you?

Once you have reached 100% your account will become unusable until the 1st of next month. To avoid having your account suspended, please login to your Client Zone and purchase a TopUp Bundle." [...]

It looks as if you are quite willing to introduce such changes on the fly - all of which are not necessarily good or welcome. Changing tack this easy does bode ill for the future. Personally, I prefer to be hard-capped once my monthly bandwidth allocation has been reached.
Click to expand...

Answered. 1st post by someone taking a "broadside"... Learn to read the posts before yours...

Afrihost-Gian said:
Hey Everyone

Thanks for detailing your concerns regarding your caps and bandwidth usage.

I will try and explain how the bandwidth system works and why depending on your previous months usage there may be less of your cap available to you this month.

As you know we supply our bandwidth through IS. They send the bandwidth usage stats from their radius server to us at various intervals throughout the day. They cannot unfortunately send us this report every minute though. This means that our bandwidth reporting in the client zone is not instant - we receive the information and then process it and apply it to our clients.

This means that in effect you will probably only be capped after you have moved some data OVER your cap due to the time delay in which they report to us.

As you know we charge R29/GB of traffic you move. All the traffic you move is added to your account - Thus if you have moved extra data over and above your cap this month that amount will be carried over to the following month which will mean that you have slightly less of your cap this month because you used it last month.

Here is an example:

Let's assume that you have a 10GB account with us at R290 per month.

You are nearing your cap and you reach 9,97 GB as we process the latest data we receive from IS. You are still under your cap so obviously or system allows you to keep going.

In between the time we receive the reports from IS you move another 0,2 GB. When we receive the next traffic report our system picks up that you have now moved 10,17 GB so far for the month which is 0,17 GB over your 10GB limit. Our system now caps you for the month.

Thus when the next month starts you will have already used 0,17 GB's over and above your allowed cap from the previous month and this will be added to the current month's usage. Thus your remaining cap for the new month will be 9,83 GB in this example (10 less 0,17).

This same rationale applies to top ups. i.e. if you used the 10,17 GB's, was capped and then bought a 1 GB top up, the extra 0,17GB you had already made use of would be included as traffic already moved and subtracted from your 1 GB top-up.

If you are worried about going over your cap and having this carry over to the next month my suggestion is to watch out for the email and SMS notification we send you letting you know when you are reaching the end of your cap and then monitor your traffic in Client Zone.

I promise you that we ar ein no way sharing accounts nor will you ever pay for traffic that you don't move.

I hope this helps?

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Hi there Broadside

Thanks for your comment.

Our system is set up to hard cap as described - As soon as we get the traffic report by IS our system hard caps any user that has reached 100% (or more) Unfortunately, as described above due to the fact that this information is not delivered on a per second or per minute basis there will be times when more traffic than your exact limit is moved.

Thanks for pointing out what we have written on our website. We do do this in as much as we are able given the parameters we have to work in. I am also going to add this explanation to the website to prevent any further confusion.

Having said all this we noticed this morning that there were certain users who were not hard capped and thus moved more than their allocated bandwidth. We have identified what caused this on our radius server and the fixes are being rolled out now.

If we did not hard cap you as you expected please accept my sincere apologies - if a user was not hard capped as they should have been please PM me and I will look into it and make a plan. These are invaluable school fees in our quest to become the best ISP in South Africa.

Please note we do not introduce changes on the fly that would affect our clients negatively - the things we change are invariably requested by users and improve our systems.

However, the basic rules will always apply. We charge you R29/GB you move and we will always charge this for the package you signed up for.

If I can be of any more assistance please feel free to PM me.

Thanks
 
I bought a 1GB top-up on the 30th of September. Used about 60MB of it that day. Now today that 1GB has disappeared from My Connectivity list. I thought the remaining top-up rolls over to the next month and is used once you use your fixed monthly amount?
 
Well I think it is really a bad system to not just cap people when your cap is up.


MyConnectivity ***@afrihost.co.za Bandwidth Update‏
From: Afrihost.com Client Services ([email protected])
Medium riskYou may not know this sender.Mark as safe|Mark as junk
Sent: 01 October 2009 12:00:18 AM
To: ***** (***@hotmail.com)

Dear *****

We trust that you are well!

Please note that your account (*******@afrihost.co.za) has
used 95% of the bandwidth that is included
with your 10 GB package.

The 10 GB package includes 10240.00 MB of
traffic and you have used 9752.69 MB so far.
Please note that you will also receive a notification for each of
your "TopUp Bundles"

We calculated that you have a total of 10.000 GB bandwidth
(including all of your additional TopUp Bundles purchased) available for
this period and have used a total of 9.524 GB so far.

What does this mean for you?

Once you have reached 100% your account will become unusable until
the 1st of next month. To avoid having your account suspended, please
login to your Client Zone and purchase a TopUp Bundle.

You can check your bandwidth that your site has moved
at any time by logging into your Client Zone at
http://clientzone.afrihost.com

If you have any questions regarding any of this please let us know

Have a great day further!

Afrihost.com Support


Afrihost.com - The Best Web Hosting...Ever !!!
-------------------------------------------
W: www.afrihost.com
P: 011 234 5045
F: 086 552 0066
E: [email protected]
-------------------------------------------
 
Jow said:
I bought a 1GB top-up on the 30th of September. Used about 60MB of it that day. Now today that 1GB has disappeared from My Connectivity list. I thought the remaining top-up rolls over to the next month and is used once you use your fixed monthly amount?
Click to expand...

There is no roll over.

You had a pro-rata amount of Gb's allocated to your account, check your invoice carefully.
 
I used up the pro-rata and then bought an additional 1GB top-up. I'm currently on a 3GB monthly.
 
Nothing could be bloody simpler yet people are getting all confused? The term making mountains out of molehills springs to mind...
 
I knew it!

I knew this was too good to be true...

I signed up for 10GB with Afrihost 3 days ago, and paid a prorata amount.

First thing I noticed, download speeds, especially international were useless. ISO images of *nix distros i normally get at 250kb/s+ were coming down at 33kb/s.

Next problem is it seems they filter incoming ports, cause my PPTP server just could not be reached. the packets timed out along the way. Same with TS server too.

So, last night (30th) I logon and cancel my account. I checked TWICE and it said "CANCELLED" - Alas I was expecting an email so didnt do a screenshot.

Today, of course, they debit my card for the month. So I email accounts to complain, and they say my account is active. I login and *miracle of miracles!* its back on and working fine. Talk about machines taking over....

They informed me to re-cancel. OK.

But here is another miracle! I switched my router back to Axxess last night (and have logs to prove it) and yet between 0h00 this morning when Afrihost reloaded the 10GB package, and 10am this morning I used 158MB!
-----------


Now I just want my money back. *sigh*

Oh yes, and I re-d/l the same ISOs and they're coming in at a fresh 220kb/s from the same server, same line, same router, same pc.
 
Last edited:
Freshy-ZN said:
Nothing could be bloody simpler yet people are getting all confused? The term making mountains out of molehills springs to mind...
Click to expand...

Tell me about it.

I much prefer having a slight overrun of my cap, that is then either deducted from my next allotment of bandwidth, or from topup bandwidth purchased, than not been capped at all, and receiving a nice R8,000 3G account.... but, yeah, maybe that's just me.

B
 
@RichTrend We do hard cap when your cap is up (as per posts 18 & 30 of this thread) However, please PM me your username so I can have a look into this as this looks like one of the accounts that our radius server (see post 30) did not hard cap after reaching your limit and hence it looks like you used double your alloted bandwidth. We have now fixed this problem so it will not happen again. As mentioned please PM me and I will ask one of the support guys to investigate and give you a shout so that they can give you that extra bandwidth you used back if this is due to our non-capping error.

@rurapente I'm sorry to hear about the poor international speeds you experienced. I have asked IS to investigate as to whether there were problems. In our testing we have generally found that the international speeds are comparable and slightly faster than than SAIX and I am sorry that you did not experience this.

WRT your cancellation: We have a 1 calendar months notice period. This means a cancelled account is still active for the month after cancellation and we continue to provide you with your service and allotted bandwidth for this time. One of the main reasons we do this is to prevent what happened to you last night and today. We need to send our debit order batch through to our bank a few days before the strike date in order for them to debit the accounts at the right time. So in this case when you cancelled your debit order had already been sent and processed by the bank and hence you were debited this morning.

Having said all this please PM me your username and I will organise that your account is deactivated now before your 30 day period is over and that you are refunded your full monthly payment.

Regarding the 158MB - Please refer to my posts #18 and #30 in this thread for a full explanation as to how our systems work and what happened.

Thanks and once again sorry that your experience with us disappointed you. I wish you all the very best with Axxess :)
 
Last edited:
Hi Gian

I've been making slow progress with regards to my cancellation questions to accounts.

I have now taken the advice above, and cancelled my 5GB account - hopefully I can still access it till the end of the month.

Many Thanks.

PS - I still want the 10GB account :)
 
I havent read the other posts, I'm guessing its a system/calculation thing, since i dont think there is a "live" bandwidth monitor anyway due to sheer volumes. I'll give the posts a read later.

What I would rather you investigate, and what was i'de say 90% reason for me cancelling is that incoming connections appeared to be blocked? I rely on being able to get to Terminal services or a vpn connection on machines from the outside into my DSL line.

Dont worry about the bandwidth thing too much, at least you're not like some wireless operators who cant even give you bandwidth usage analysis yet somehow bill you for it at the end of the month :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X