[EHPweb] Akamai billing algorithm

[Wald Lisa]

Web Team et al.-

This email is just for your information.  If you aren't interested in  
the website traffic and how Akamai bills us for it, you can delete this.

Lorna Schmid, Judy Ferrier, and I had a conference call with Todd  
Aikers at Akamai list week to learn how Akamai bills us for services  
and what our options are for the future.  This is a summary of what we  
learned.

AKAMAI FEE ALGORITHM
The annual contract with Akamai is 420K.  The Earthquake Hazards  
Program has been paying 120K of the bill, while E-web has been paying  
300K.  The contract covers:

www.usgs.gov
earthquake.usgs.gov
quake.wr.usgs.gov
pasadena.wr.usgs.gov
neic.usgs.gov

We basically pay for bandwidth per month.  We are allotted 30mbits/sec  
average per month using something called the 95/5 algorithm which has  
something to do with 95%.  In addition we have 400mbits for the entire  
year that we can draw from if we go over the 30mbits/sec in any month  
(termed "bursting").  We are not charged for super-bursting until we  
reach 4 times our monthly allotment (30 mbit/sec x 4) which is 120  
mbits/sec.  At that point we're charged $0.02 per mbyte over the  
120mbits.  Note that the units are different, and we don't know  
exactly how this part works yet.  In any case, we have not had any  
superbursting charges since this algorithm was put into place (or we  
should not have had any, in any case, although Lorna thinks we may  
have paid for superbursting when we weren't supposed to in the past).

EHP AKAMAI USAGE
In February of this year, our Akamai usage went over 30mbits/sec for  
the first time; it was 40+ in Feb, 50+ in April, and almost 70 in  
May.  Most of the increase was from the EHP website, but we're still  
trying to determine if it is due to simply increasing traffic due to  
recent earthquakes, or if there is a new or larger file that has  
caused the significant increase.  Since we've been making alot of  
changes to configurations on the Akamai end and on our end, it's  
difficult to pinpoint the cause.  The most recent config change was  
made at the beginning of June, so we will have to wait until the end  
of this month to see the significance of the latest change.

BOTTOM LINE
E-web wants the Earthquake Hazards Program to pay for the percentage  
of Akamai services that we're using when the contract is renewed (or  
re-bid) soon, which will be significantly more than 120K, since we use  
approximately 90% of the service.  No matter who ends up paying for  
the service, we need to determine the cause of our rising bandwidth  
and configure our Akamai usage to minimize this number.  However, if  
the increase is due simply to increasing web traffic, there is really  
nothing we can do aside from optimizing our file sizes, which we have  
done with some files, and continue to investigate for others.

I am currently do some log analysis with our web traffic stats, but  
nothing is jumping out at me as the single cause of the increasing  
bandwidth.  I'll be looking into "last mile compression" this week  
which could buy us a huge savings all the way around.

- Lisa
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