[LINK] WorldCom Charges Cause Panic

[Tom Worthington]

WorldCom has sent a message to web host customers 
<<https://vemail.server-secure.com/vision6/webcentral/vemail/logLink.php?id=343:175:124&link=http://www1.worldcom.com/au/products/>http://www1.worldcom.com/au/products/  
 > to say that they will start charging for excess bandwidth as of October:

>Excess Bandwidth Charges Notification... We trust you have been enjoying 
>your WorldCom webhosting service to date. A recent review of your service 
>has revealed an oversight on our part in relation to the billing of your 
>service. As you may be aware, the website you have purchased has a certain 
>amount of bandwidth volume in megabytes (MB) included within the monthly 
>charges you are currently paying. Please refer to the list below.  When 
>you exceed the allowance that applies to your website, the lower amount of 
>either inbound data or outbound data transferred is meant to be charged at 
>a fixed rate of ...

I have been a very happy WebCentral customer for years and I hadn't 
realised I was a WorldCom customer. I was even prepared to pay when they 
previously forgot to bill for a year's service.

When I checked the web statistics (as per WorldComs' instructions) I found 
my company web site <http://www.tomw.net.au/> was serving an average of 
19807.88 hits or 216143.52 Kilobytes, a week. This would cost about $30 a 
week in excess fees, a considerable amount for a small one-person 
consulting company, and I started to panic.

After having lunch and calming down, I decided to read the WorldCom 
announcement again. It says: "When you exceed the allowance that applies to 
your website, the lower amount of either inbound data or outbound data 
transferred is meant to be charged at a fixed rate ...". As there would be 
very little incoming data, compared to web pages served, this shouldn't 
result in an excess charge. A recorded message on the WorldCom enquiry line 
says they are sending out a clarification which should hopefully remove the 
panic.

ps: While panicking I checked who was currently reading my web site and 
found 27 active sessions. However, 21 of these were Google crawlers 
(crawl1.googlebot.com, crawl2.googlebot.com ... ) indexing the site, which 
seems a bit excessive.

pps: A few minutes later I checked again and there are now 53 active 
sessions, most of which are Google crawlers. Is this normal?



Tom Worthington FACS tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617

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