You can always increase your bandwidth commitment without having to re-negotiate any terms of your agreement. Red Anvil is typically able to provision additional bandwidth needs within hours of receiving an authorized party’s request.

If you have a 10Mbps burstable circuit and find that you are always bursting over about 1 or 2 Mbps we can increase your committed to rate to 12Mbps so that you can avoid paying the 1.25 multiplier on those additional 2Mbps.

An upper burst limit is established for two important reasons. 

The first reason is economical. As a client you may be interested in burstable bandwidth because your traffic is prone to spikes during special events or specific times of the day.  While you want to avoid network congestion and lag you don’t want to open yourself up to the potential for the extra fee for bursting to go beyond a certain threshold.

The second reason is for security. There is the potential for security incidents to push your bandwidth beyond your normal usage patterns.  If a malicious end user were to flood your servers with a Denial of Service type attack or a virus on one of your servers were to “go rouge” and start spraying out network traffic Red Anvil needs to contain that activity within a set limit so its impact does not spread to other clients.

Yes.  The peak usage data points are thrown out.  The top 5% of your usage for the entire month is ignored and your billable rate is the maximum value remaining after that data is ignored.

Burstable bandwidth is calculated using industry standard 95% utilization metrics.  Red Anvil polls its routers every 5 minutes and collects bandwidth utilization information for each internet circuit.  This data is used to generate your bandwidth utilization graphs.

If you have a burstable circuit, at the end of every month we take all the data points that were collected for your circuit and throw out the top 5% of the values.  The maximum value remaining after the top 5% is discarded is the billable utilization.  If this value is greater than the committed to bandwidth then an additional charge is assessed for the difference between the billable utilization and the committed bandwidth times a 1.25 per megabit cost multiplier. If this value is less than your committed to rate, then no additional charge is assessed.

So for example if you have a 10Mbps burstable circuit the following scenario may occur:

1. At the beginning of the month your are billed for you 10Mbps
2. During the month your bandwidth usage spikes above 10Mbps several times. 
3. At the end of the month after throwing out the top 5% of the data points collected it is determined that your billable utilization is 12.5 Mbps.
4. You would be sent an additional bill that would be for:
      2.5Mbps * your per Mbps rate * 1.25

Red Anvil provides DNS servers for clients to use to resolve DNS.  The IP address of the name servers to use for DNS lookups are:
204.11.208.17
204.11.208.18

Reverse DNS allows you to specify what name a given IP address will return when translated from an IP address to a hostname. The authority to set the name of a specific IP address belongs to the owner of the IP address. If you have received an IP block allocation from Red Anvil then you will have the ability in Net Forge to manage the reverse DNS mappings for those specific IP addresses.

A slight premium is charged on bandwidth used above your committed to rate because Red Anvil must maintain enough extra bandwidth above the sum total of all our committed to circuits so that we have bandwidth to burst into.  Since the usage is unpredictable and not “spoken for” this bandwidth has a higher cost metric.

Standard Ethernet circuits delivered by Red Anvil have an upper limit to the amount of bandwidth the client’s circuit is allowed to use.  This is called the committed bandwidth and it is chosen by the client when selecting their services with Red Anvil and is the basis for the pricing of their Internet circuit. For example a client may purchase a 10Mbps circuit, which allows them to use up to 10 Mega bits per second. 

If a client’s usage reaches their upper limit the router begins to discards any traffic that would put the circuit over the upper limit.  This causes end users to experience lag and potentially network timeouts.  Network traffic for all users is slowed down as congestion occurs and end users compete for their requests to be passed through within the limit.  A good analogy for this is freeway traffic congestion.  Once it starts, all traffic is slowed down until the bottleneck is past.

With burstable bandwidth, the client selects a committed bandwidth amount and an upper burst limit.  On a monthly basis the customer is charged for their committed bandwidth amount.  Their circuit is allowed to exceed that amount though and go all the way up to the upper burst limit.  This allows surges of traffic to go beyond the committed amount sidestepping network congestion and eliminating lag and timeouts for end users.

At the end of the month, the bandwidth used by the circuit is evaluated and if the usage exceeded the committed bandwidth amount the client is charged an additional fee for the excess bandwidth.

Red Anvil provides a Network Time Server for clients to use for time synchronization.  The time server is:
ntp.redanvil.net

Red Anvil can provide authoritative DNS hosting for domain names that our clients own and use.  Red Anvil does not charge for DNS hosting*.  Clients may manage their own DNS zones and records using the Net Forge system. Changes made through the Net Forge system will be recognized by Red Anvil’s authoritative DNS servers within 15 minutes.

Please note that Red Anvil is not a domain registrar. Any fees or costs associated with registering or purchasing a domain name are the responsibility of the client.
* Red Anvil reserves the right to limit the number of zones being hosted or negotiate additional charges if the number of DNS zones belonging to a single client becomes obsessive, ie more than 500. 

Primary and Secondary DNS Hosting
If you would like Red Anvil to host a domain’s DNS you should first add the domain using Net Forge. Then configure any necessary DNS records for the domains.
For a new domain the next step is to register the domain with your registrar of choice and specify Red Anvil’s servers as the Primary and Secondary name servers.
If the domain is an existing domain that is migrating to Red Anvil, the next step is to visit the website of the Registrar for the domain. Typically a online user account allows you access to a management tool that allows you to change the Primary and Secondary DNS name servers. After verifying that all DNS entries that currently exist with the existing hosting source have been added to the domain using Net Forge you should then use the Registrar’s web tool to update the DNS name servers to point at Red Anvil’s servers. After this change has propagated (typically 1 day) make sure the previous DNS hosting provider is notified to discontinue DNS hosting.

Red Anvil’s Authoritative DNS Servers
ns1.redanvil.net           204.11.208.15
ns2.redanvil.net           204.11.208.25

Note: Red Anvil’s Authoritative DNS servers are optimized for resolving the domains hosted by Red Anvil and will not respond to queries about non-local domains.  For non-authoritative lookups, please use Red Anvil’s DNS Resolvers.

Secondary (slave) DNS Hosting
If you wish to maintain your own Primary DNS server you may use Red Anvil’s Authoritative DNS servers as secondary and tertiary servers. Net Forge allows you to configure a domain as a Secondary Only domain. In this case Red Anvil’s DNS servers will pull DNS data from your Primary server.

To setup a domain for this type of service you must specify Red Anvil’s servers as your secondary and or tertiary server with the Registrar.

In addition to configuring the domain properly with the registrar you need to add the appropriate NS records to the zone file on your master server as well as allow zone transfers from Red Anvil’s DNS servers.

Zone File Entries
@ IN NS ns1.redanvil.net
@ IN NS ns2.redanvil.net

IP addresses allowed to Zone Transfer
204.11.205.15
204.11.205.25