I have a bill dispute, bandwidth randomly gone and now I am in the Red

[Mark Paul]

Hello, I'm not sure this is the right forum but I'm finding this website a little bit confusing.

I've been hosting a VERY underground Techno Radio show for my Techno Label (VERY Low Listener counts) where we stream live club DJ/Live sets and impromptu special radio shows through an audio interface > BUTT > Squarespace play button. We've been purchasing bandwidth through you guys and I have now found myself and my account suddenly in the red -7GB worth of Data. I can't imagine ever using near that amount in a single show.

I had purchased maybe 10-20$ worth of bandwidth which amounted to like 10-20 gigabytes of data to stream a number of shows and it seems I have somehow used infinitely more bandwidth in one recent session than i ever did in hosting 30 live radio shows total over the course of a year.

I look at my reports and they talk of a total data transfer of less than a gigabite of data during my last few streams, and the total listeners for the last little while seems to say the same, small data transfers from very very few people for very short amounts of time.

I can't imagine what could have happened here... My one theory is that i left BUTT running on a recent higher bitrate stream. However, I always complete dissassemble my setup after shows adn BUTT running shouldnt cause any data transfer once my audio interfaces are unplugged as there is no other audio enabled on my computer, so no data to transfer, and certainly not GIGABYTES worth of data.

Hopefully someone can help me out here, or even give me a proper log of my data transmissions that isnt convoluted for me to look at here.

 

[Mark Paul]

AutoDJ is off... Has NOT been turned on after a brief instance of it sucking our bandwidth.

 

[Support]

Hi Mark,

What is your accounts username please? We shall take a look into this for you.

Please be aware that the bandwidth balances are not updated in real-time, they are only updated once a day in the morning (UK time). So this may be why you have seen a sudden drop in your bandwidth balance.

We do also have a bandwidth calculator that will give you a better idea of the kind of bandwidth usage that you can expect: http://www.internet-radio.com/servers/tools/bandwidth/
http://www.internet-radio.com/servers/tools/bandwidth/
Did you by any chance stream at a higher bitrate than normal this time? If for example you were streaming at 320kbps, then this would use almost three times the amount of bandwidth than it would streaming at 128kbps. And even if you had unplugged your audio interface but you had still left BUTT connected to the server and some of your listeners also did not disconnect from the stream then that would use bandwidth still even though it's basically just playing dead air. Only if the server was completely switched off or you had no source connected to the server would this not use any data.

But if you let us know your username we shall take a look at your reports for you just to make sure that this is all correct!

 

[Mark Paul]

My username is mapaul

Yes we were streaming in 320 kbps mp3 for the final time that we used the streaming service, however we get VERY low listeners. I still don't think it would amount to that, using the calculator if one person listens for the entire show thats a half a gig and trust me its like less active than that. no one has ever listened to a full 5 hour club set and max listeners never tops like 3...

I guess checking to see will show where the data is being used I find it difficult to believe we'd use nearly 10 gigabytes streaming dead air. Hopefully thats not the case.

Thank you for your quick response!

 

[Support]

Thanks Mark.

Ok well yes from looking at our billing records it is showing that in July and August of 2016 you purchased two lots of 10GB. You set the account up on the 25/07/2016 and from looking at your control panels reports we can see that you have only used 6.59GB since then. So something is wrong here! There was a bug a while ago with the delay of the server logs processing and some "pay as you go" accounts were seeing their bandwidth balances reducing each day even if the account had not streamed but the server had been left switched on. Centovacast have since addressed this bug in one of their updates after we made them aware of this. So that is the only explanation for this that we can offer here really.

So what we have done is cleared the negative balance for you and credited your account with 20GB of bandwidth for free as a way of apology.