Yes, we are pretty much in the same boat. I thought about not
offering email altogether, but did not think that would fly. :-) We
are not big enough to have gobbs of bandwidth yet either.
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 9:23 AM, David Camm HIDDEN@advwebsys.com> wrote:
> i'm in a similar situation - i think. unlike most of the folk who populate
> this list, i'm not 'mail-centric.' we provide email as a convenience to our
> web site customers. we have a few customers who have large numbers of
> accounts and those we charge anywhere from $2 to $3 per mailbox per month..
> it's certainly not a revenue generator, but the beauty of using surgemail is
> that it just sits there and runs, so it doesn't take much for us to support
> it.
>
> i don't know what your business (or configuration) is, but if you're truly
> concerned about the mail server sucking large amounts of bandwidth, you
> might consider putting a limiter in front of it. i also believe there are
> parameters in the configuration you can adjust, but i've not used them, so i
> don't know what they are.
>
> david camm
> advanced web systems
> keller, tx
>
>
> On 3/8/2011 6:44 PM, Tony Zakula wrote:
>>
>> Thank you for the responses. I was planning to bill/setup a limit for
>> bandwidth per customer. However, the way I have it now, I have one ip
>> address and am using virtual hosts on surgemail. I guess I did not
>> really think about how to account for mail traffic. I could see not
>> really worrying about it, but what if you have a customer getting and
>> sending tons of messages. I was planning to offer 10 free email
>> accounts and then charge a fee for everyone above that. I am still at
>> a low number of customers so nothing is a problem yet, but just trying
>> to think ahead.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:21 PM, David CammHIDDEN@advwebsys.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> the real question, imho, is what you want to measure. and what you want
>>> to
>>> bill for.
>>>
>>> when someone sends a message to one of your customers, that message is x
>>> bytes. when your customer sends a message to an external server, that's y
>>> bytes.
>>>
>>> if your customer uses pop to download messages to a client, he (she)
>>> downloads n bytes in that download.
>>>
>>> if they use surgeweb, they transfer z bytes during a session, which of
>>> course, includes the web pages.
>>>
>>> if they use imap at all, then disk utilization may be a billable resource
>>> -
>>> i had one customer who accumulated over 5G of messages and never realized
>>> they needed to prune things once in a while. i wonder how long it took to
>>> load their inbox....
>>>
>>> bytes of thruput can be converted to bandwidth - i BELIEVE 221Gb of
>>> transfer
>>> in one month is equivalent to 1Mb/sec.
>>>
>>> i frankly don't know where or whether this info is available in the
>>> myriad
>>> of logs. but, if it is, it is certainly possible to extract it with some
>>> neat grepping and perl scripting.
>>>
>>> we do this on our shared web servers for customers with heavy ftp
>>> traffic.
>>> on the first of the month, we look at the ftp transfer logs for the
>>> previous
>>> month and accumulate transferred bytes (in and out) by user. we can then
>>> bill based on total transfer. we even keep history in a little mysql
>>> database.
>>>
>>> david camm
>>> advanced web systems
>>> keller, tx
>>>
>>>
>>> On 3/8/2011 5:00 PM, VinnyHIDDEN@@Dell.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I don't, but if you had each domain on a different IP address, you could
>>>> easily turn on ip accounting on a Cisco device and measure it via
>>>> SNMP... or
>>>> just via the Cisco CLI.
>>>>
>>>> -Vinny
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Tony Zakula [mailtoHIDDEN@kula@gmail.com]
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 3:57 PM
>>>> To: surgemailHIDDEN@etwinsite.com
>>>> Subject: [SurgeMail List] Bandwidth Accounting
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone do bandwidth accounting for their email services?
>>>> Especially if you are running lots of domains on one mail server and web
>>>> services on other servers? If so, what do you use to measure per
>>>> customer?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>> Tony Z
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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