GoDaddy
Bandwidth Billing

Recently received a failed billing attempt from GoDaddy for US$3,400. The invoice states downloads of almost 5TB of data over the first two months of use. This seems very large and very strange and I said as much to GoDaddy Support. They indicated that the downloads were consistent across the billing period and I would have to pay the bill to get current.

My own investigation of the site logs showed that 98.9% of the pro-ported downloads occurred on a single day (23rd of November) and were “completed” by a single PC on a Bigpond CPE connection (124.186.121.210). Log File Attached. Logic says this is impossible, just do the math. 5TB of data in 1 day is 208GB per hour. That is a DVD a minute and about 60MB per second. A 100Mbps link will do about 12MB per second theoretical. The Bigpond connection is a regular DSLII link and not capable of that speed. I checked.

Another 90 minute call to GoDaddy support including a frustrating session with a supervisor failed to get any better response than – “The usage is spread out over the month”, “Someone is abusing your site”, “Your responsible” and “I have gone to bat for you – please pay $1600″. The first statement is a fabrication at best – see log report.

When I pointed out that the unlimited plan is 14.95 and perhaps they should just charge me the difference between the “ultimate” plan and the unlimited plan (about $7) they told me I used the bandwidth and would have to pay for it. I suggested that if I used the bandwidth they would be able to provide router logs to show this but was told the webserver logs were sufficient. I asked to speak to a manager and was told that the supervisor was the last resort and he had done what he could.

Well….. $1600 is a lot to pay for something that is clearly impossible so I decided to test the system.

I screen cam’d myself using wget on the files shown in the log. The files “downloaded” are aprox 3.5GB in size.

Wget started and appeared to complete each download in about a second.

BUT 1 only received about 1K of data per attempt – See Quicktime Video and Windows Media Video.

Interestingly the ex20091212000001-97.74.24.136. Log from the GoDaddy webserver suggest that the entire file was downloaded each time. Sometimes in less than a second:

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:16 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:26 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:27 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:29 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:31 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:32 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:46 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:48 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:50 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:51 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

118.208.15.23 – - [11/Dec:23: 17:53 -0700] “GET tasteshare.com/files/mv102. Iso HTTP/1.0″ 200 3547955200 “ - rdquo; “Wget/1.8.2″

GoDaddy servers provided me 1KB of data but are charging me for 3.5GB PER attempt.

5TB of data is a lot to download in a day. Not so much when it’s imaginary.

The Net Net – GoDaddy use weblogs for billing AND the weblogs do NOT accurately report data actually transferred ONLY data requested.

Company: GoDaddy
Country: USA

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