95th-percentile billing prices bandwidth not on total bytes but on sustained peak throughput: the provider samples your usage (e.g. every 5 minutes), discards the highest 5% of samples, and bills on the remaining peak. The idea is to charge for the capacity you routinely consume while forgiving brief spikes.
It changes optimization priorities compared to per-GB egress: smoothing peaks becomes valuable, so a few very high but short bursts (a live premiere) may be "free" under the discarded 5%, while a consistently high baseline is expensive. Understanding which billing model a CDN or transit link uses is essential to modeling delivery cost accurately.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
95th-percentile billing charges for sustained peaks, so one big live event a month can set the whole bandwidth bill. We wrote seven volumes covering the video stack; for 95th-percentile pricing start with Volume 3 on CDNs and the economics of delivery, then Volume 2 on transport, with bitrate savings in Volume 1. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Live peaks pushing up a CDN bill billed at the 95th percentile?
We will model your traffic against your CDN contracts and send a pricing plan comparing 95th-percentile and per-GB options. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
