Bandwidth pooling
This is a key mechanism for hosting buyers to determine which provider is offering the right pricing mechanism of bandwidth pricing.[according to whom?] Most Dedicated Hosting providers bundle bandwidth pricing along with the monthly charge for the dedicated server. Let us illustrate this with the help of an example. An average $100 server from any of the common dedicated bandwidth providers would carry 2 TB of bandwidth. Suppose you purchased 10 servers then you would have the ability to consume 2 TB of bandwidth per server. However, let us assume that given your application architecture only 2 of these 10 servers are really web facing while the rest are used for storage, search, database or other internal functions then the provider that allows bandwidth pooling would let you consume overall 20 TB of bandwidth as incoming or outbound or both depending on their policy. The provider that does not offer bandwidth pooling would just let you use 4 TB of bandwidth, and the rest of the 16 TB of bandwidth would be practically unusable. This fact is commonly known by all hosting providers, and allows hosting providers to cut costs by offering an amount of bandwidth that frequently will not be used. This is known as overselling, and allows high bandwidth customers to use more than what a host might otherwise offer, because they know that this will be balanced out by those customers who use less than the maximum allowed.
One of the reasons for choosing to outsource dedicated servers is the availability of high powered networks from multiple providers. As dedicated server providers utilize massive amounts of bandwidth, they are able to secure lower volume based pricing to include a multi-provider blend of bandwidth. To achieve the same type of network without a multi-provider blend of bandwidth, a large investment in core routers, long term contracts, and expensive monthly bills would need to be in place. The expenses needed to develop a network without a multi-provider blend of bandwidth does not make sense economically for hosting providers.
