High Volume Account

The High-Volume Account provides a solution for sites with bandwidth requirements beyond our standard offerings, but without the level of CGI activity that would make a move to you own server more appropriate. Because we expect any High-Volume account to fully utilize its bandwidth allowance at all times, the pricing is considerably higher. However, the pricing for overusage is lower, and there are usage tiers that lower the overall cost as your bandwidth needs increase.

The High-Volume account includes all of the features of the Webmaster account, as well as a 500Mb disk quota and a bandwidth allowance that starts at 1Gb/day. The pricing is tiered as shown below; your charge in any given month will be based on the best rate for your bandwidth usage.

Tier Disk Bandwidth Monthly

1 500Mb 1Gb/day $249.95

2 500Mb 2Gb/day $499.95

3 500Mb 3Gb/day $734.95

4 500Mb 4Gb/day $999.95

The setup fee is $150, and bandwidth overusage is charged at $3.00/month for each 10Mb/day increase in average daily bandwidth. For example, average traffic of 1200Mb/day during a month would be 176Mb/day over the Tier 1 allowance, so the overusage charge would be $54 for that month (that's 18 increases, at $3.00 each).
Disk overusage is billed at the standard rate of $0.10/month for each Mb over the 500Mb quota.
If you can justify having your own server, or have strong CGI needs, please contact us for more information.
Our Secure Server add-on cannot be used with this account type.

Why does this cost so much more than your other accounts?

This account costs more because we expect any site using it to be making full use of its bandwidth allowance. The servers that host these sites are engineered specifically to accommodate that.
With our normal account types, users are always welcome to use their full bandwidth allowance, but it's a simple fact of reality that most do not, and consequently we can amortize the bandwidth expense across all accounts, to the benefit of everyone. Larger sites, however, generate a larger expense on our network, which we must pass along.

Why can't I just buy two or three Webmaster accounts instead?

Because we prohibit, by policy, hosting one site on multiple accounts in order to avoid bandwidth overusage charges. As stated above, we encourage our users to utilize their bandwidth allowance as fully as they desire, but beyond that level, we have to charge in accordance with the expense on our network.
Our bandwidth expenses have actually increased over the past year, as we have improved our external connectivity dramatically, and are currently working to upgrade our network core for full end-to-end redundancy. In order to further maintain and expand our network, it is necessary to pass along these costs, while still providing suitable and scaleable solutions for our customers.

Does this mean that Ruby Dunes no longer has competitive pricing for bandwidth?

Not at all. In fact, study the following graph of price versus bandwidth allowances for our services, as well as for eleven of our competitors. It should be fairly clear that we remain the industry leader in price/performance ratios.

Some of your competitors offer "unlimited" bandwidth!

Ask them if they are willing to host a 4Gb/day (120Gb/month) account - or even a 1Gb/day account - with no extra charges. Chances are good that they don't even have the necessary capacity in their network.
In our experience, many of the so-called "unlimited" providers kick sites off, or try to apply additional charges, well before they reach even our standard 400Mb/day allowance for Webmaster accounts.

If I upgrade to this account type, do you need to move my account to a different server?

Yes, we will coordinate the move with you. Typically, your site will be down for no more than fifteen minutes. High-Volume accounts are hosted on servers specifically engineered and tuned for large amounts of traffic.

Do you limit instantaneous bandwidth or shut off sites that are over a predetermined limit?

No. Some providers use "traffic shaping" or other techniques to bottleneck customers' Web sites, so that, for example, the maximum transfer rate is 128,000 bits/second. This provides a theoretical maximum transfer per day (about 1.3Gb/day in this example) but in reality, imposes a much tighter restraint, especially during peak hours. Our customers' sites may "burst" to any necessary level of bandwidth at any time, in order to accommodate demand. We also do not shut off any site at any predetermined level of traffic.