Is it really bandwidth or traffic?

Submitted by yngens on Tue, 10/18/2016 - 18:59

I wanted to activate the Bandwidth Monitoring feature on a Virtualmin server and am confused with the terminology.

By definition the bandwidth is the width of the pipe the data travels down and traffic is the amount of data you actually send and receive. Bandwidth is usually measured by traffic amount per second, for example 100 Mbps (megabits per second) Fast Ethernet. Traffic is usually measured by the amount of data passed through a particular network by month, for example 10 GB per mont. Additional material: https://www.metawerx.net/host/options/extra_bandwidth.htm

So probably all occurrences of "Bandwidth" on Virtualmin's UI need to be replaced by "Traffic". Can you please elaborate on this?

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Comments

Submitted by yngens on Tue, 10/18/2016 - 19:06

Also, it would be much nicer to send pre-overage notifications, in other words not when the VS has de-facto already exceeded, but beforehand, for example, when it reaches 90%. Currently it explicitly states:

Send email to server owners when over limit? If bandwidth usage limit has been surpassed, this open determines whether an email will be sent to the server owner email address notifying them of the overage.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 10/18/2016 - 19:50

You're technically correct that it's really "traffic" and not "bandwidth". However, we went with this wording as that's what users expect it to be called :-(

Submitted by yngens on Tue, 10/18/2016 - 21:59

You're technically correct that it's really "traffic" and not "bandwidth". However, we went with this wording as that's what users expect it to be called :-(

Well, this incorrect wording could have legal implications for, especially, hosting companies which have to officially disclose this kind of details as precise as possible.

So please accept my request to change the wording to the correct one. Please understand that as control panel vendor you simply can not take this kind of matters easy and follow what users "expect" and on the contrary your have to educate them by using the correct terminology.

Submitted by yngens on Wed, 10/19/2016 - 07:45

Category: Support request ยป Bug report

Since you admitted the incorrectness of Bandwith in the UI context, I am changing this to bug report even if it is just UI wording, because as a hosting company we would like to provide the precise definitions. Otherwise, as it was said before this could have legal implications between hosting providers and their clients in case of disagreement on bandwidth/traffic limitations.

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 10/19/2016 - 08:31

We unfortunately have a few different terminology things like that.

We used certain wording due to it being what users expected, or made more sense to users, even if it wasn't technically correct.

Now that we've been using it for some time now, it can cause a lot of confusion to change it. It's a pretty big deal to change terminology like that.

We have actually discussed revamping some of the wording and terminology being used within Virtualmin.

That's something for the future though. Such a change would be a big deal, with lots of planning, warnings to our users, and website posts, and the like.

In the meantime, if you're concerned about that, you could always include clarifications within the signup emails, or in the bandwidth notification emails that go out.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 10/19/2016 - 21:46

So one option would be to use Virtualmin's language file override feature to change the wording on just your system - would that work?

Submitted by yngens on Thu, 10/20/2016 - 00:29

Well, in that case of course we will start using language over-ridings. But I believe one day in the future you will have to start using the correct terminology to avoid possible conflicts in interpretations.