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How can someone rack up an $18,000 bill? Was that just over a single month? I'm not a client of Rackspace, but I thought they billed out monthly, so if you don'

by d2viant 16y ago

How can someone rack up an $18,000 bill? Was that just over a single month? I'm not a client of Rackspace, but I thought they billed out monthly, so if you don't pay your bill I thought they would shutdown your service. What happens, do they leave your service running and just let your bill compound?

qeorge 16y ago
Rackspace is a little different than most hosts. They want you to sign a paper contract, and will give you better prices if you commit for at least 12 months. So its possible the OP had a good bit of time left on a contract, which he's now on the hook for. It would also make sense for Rackspace to take a smaller payment in such a case, as they wouldn't have rendered the services yet anyway.
chopsueyar 16y ago
Mid-month bandwidth overages. I had to deal with a Rackspace account and bandwidth overage one week into a new billing cycle. IIRC, it was something like $2.50 per gigabyte after the first 1.5TB. The more you pay per month, the higher the limit, and lower the per gigabyte overage fee. Somewhat akin to a US cellular telephone company (without bandwidth rollover bytes).
lkrubner 16y ago
> How can someone rack up an $18,000 bill? I'm not sure I understand what you are asking here. I'm sure Rackspace has many clients who run up charges well over $100,000 every month. RackSpace handles some very large clients. Recall that YouTube started out on RackSpace, and was on RackSpace at least till the end of 2006 (I forget the exact date YouTube left RackSpace). RackSpace actually invented a special low rate (regarding bandwidth), just for YouTube, but, instead of paying monthly, YouTube had to pay daily, in exchange for that ultra low rate. I'd guess that RackSpace clients probably follow something of a power curve, with the top 1% of their clients using something like 30% or 40% or 50% of all the bandwidth that RackSpace sells. And of course, that top 1% would have very large monthly bills.

by d2viant 16y ago

qeorge 16y ago

Rackspace is a little different than most hosts. They want you to sign a paper contract, and will give you better prices if you commit for at least 12 months. So its possible the OP had a good bit of time left on a contract, which he's now on the hook for. It would also make sense for Rackspace to take a smaller payment in such a case, as they wouldn't have rendered the services yet anyway.

chopsueyar 16y ago

Mid-month bandwidth overages. I had to deal with a Rackspace account and bandwidth overage one week into a new billing cycle. IIRC, it was something like $2.50 per gigabyte after the first 1.5TB. The more you pay per month, the higher the limit, and lower the per gigabyte overage fee. Somewhat akin to a US cellular telephone company (without bandwidth rollover bytes).

lkrubner 16y ago

> How can someone rack up an $18,000 bill? I'm not sure I understand what you are asking here. I'm sure Rackspace has many clients who run up charges well over $100,000 every month. RackSpace handles some very large clients. Recall that YouTube started out on RackSpace, and was on RackSpace at least till the end of 2006 (I forget the exact date YouTube left RackSpace). RackSpace actually invented a special low rate (regarding bandwidth), just for YouTube, but, instead of paying monthly, YouTube had to pay daily, in exchange for that ultra low rate. I'd guess that RackSpace clients probably follow something of a power curve, with the top 1% of their clients using something like 30% or 40% or 50% of all the bandwidth that RackSpace sells. And of course, that top 1% would have very large monthly bills.