ScioSoft's Community Blogs

PowerShell: Get OS Installation Date

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:43:00 -0500

Here is a quick, and oh-so-easy, one-liner to see when you installed a machine’s Operating System:

([WMI]'').ConvertToDateTime((Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).InstallDate)

The main part of the command gets the install date:

(Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).InstallDate

The problem is, if you just run this command, the result is not so human-friendly:

20090328134854.000000-240

To fix this up, we can apply the ConvertToDate method, which is actually a Common helper method (that has nothing to do with the Win32_Service WMI class). To do this I used /\/\o\/\/’s method of creating an "Empty" WMI class for this ([WMI]''):

([WMI]'').ConvertToDateTime()

Once we do this, we get a nice, human-friendly result:

March-28-09 1:48:54 PM

Happy OS Dating (…judging by the date on my system, it looks like it is time for a reimage),
James Fielding

Launch PowerShell Script from Shortcut

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:42:00 -0500

PowerShell is a great system management tool, and can help administrators to quickly perform tasks and collect information.

One frustration many users have with PowerShell is, unlike traditional .bat files, .ps1 files will not run by default due to PowerShell's enhanced security. Now this is OK when you’re dealing with a couple of machines, as a quick PowerShell one-liner at the prompt will fix things up for you:

 Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope Process

But, when you're dealing with a large number of machines, and/or you'd prefer to keep PowerShell’s security settings in place, here's a quick workaround. Run the script via a shortcut that temporarily allows the script to run:

In Windows Explorer, create a new shortcut. It doesn’t matter what your shortcut’s target is, as we’ll change that momentarily.
Right-click on your new shortcut, and choose “Properties”.
Change the shortcut’s Target to the following:
```
%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "E:\Scripts\MyScript.ps1" 
```
Where “E:\Scripts\MyScript.ps1” is the path to the script you want to run.
Click “OK”.

From here, you just need to double-click your shortcut to run your script.

Sometimes you won’t want the command window to provide output. For example, say your scripts outputs to a text file. If this is the case, simply add:

-WindowStyle Hidden

Also, if you are using this on machines that could potentially have an altered Powershell profile, you'll likely want to add:

-NoProfile

I often use this trick to run .ps1 scripts locally via a USB flashdrive. For each set of scripts that I need to run, I have a shortcut. Then, I just plug in the flashdrive, and double-click the shortcut. This way, you can quickly run scripts locally on multiple machines. Try it out!

Happy PowerShell Shortcutting,
James Fielding

Google, HTML5 and SEO

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:15:00 -0500

To use HTML5, or not use HTML5, that is the question...especially when you’re considering Google and SEO.

There are lots of people on both sides of the debate:

PROS & CONS

PROS: Moves the semantic web one step closer, which should help my search rankings (in the long run), and some of the new tags, like <video> and <canvas>, can leave users and clients awestruck, to say the least.

CONS: Not a standard, yet... so I risk having my search rankings and user experience ending up in the crapper.

THE RISKS

In reality, the risks of using HTML5 boil down to three separate issues:

Google will not rank my site properly, because it can’t find my content.
Internet Explorer users with <IE9 will ditch my site, because it won’t look right, or worse, won’t show up at all.
Mobile users with older devices will have a really bad experience when they visit my site.

We’re going to look at all three issues, and how to mitigate them.

1. GOOGLE WILL NOT RANK MY SITE PROPERLY

This has been a giant concern for the SEO-savvy, and Google has not helped the situation on their Webmaster forum by alternating between being cryptic to direct questions, or completely silent. Having said this, Google’s own John Mueller has stated, "I definitely wouldn't want to stand in the way of your implementing parts of your site with HTML5, but I also wouldn't expect to see special treatment of your content due to the HTML5 markup at the moment."

So...(drum roll, please)...for Google...this is a total non-issue. And, when you think about it, this makes sense: Have a look at you HTML4 sites and the relative weighting of links in a page’s body vs. links in its footer. The Googlebot is smart enough to find and weight the footer links less than the body links. It does this with no semantics. As long as you use well-formed tags, whether you are using HTML4 or HTML5, there’s no problem.

2. INTERNET EXPLORER PROBLEMS

Ok, unlike point 1 above, IE has some real issues... but at least this one is easily solved, or at least when it comes to layout elements. As you’re probably aware, browsers tend to ignore HTML tags they don’t understand. Since IE doesn’t auto update, there’s lots of older versions of IE out there... and they (<IE9) don’t necessarily understand the new HTML5 tags.

It’s easy to rectify this, simply add this tag in the head section of your HTML 5 webpage above your CSS, and you’re good to go:

<!--[if lt IE 9]><script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script><![endif]-->

The shiv, provided by Google, allows older versions of IE to recognise and style HTML5 elements. It’s simple, fast and free.

Not a fan of having somebody else control your content. No Problem. You can do the same thing as the shiv by adding {display:block} to the appropriate HTML5 tags that you are using. For example, add the following CSS:

header, section, footer, article, nav {display: block;}

To help IE6, you’ll also need to add some JavaScript to your document’s head section to create the tags:

<!--[if lt IE 7]><script>
document.createElement("header");
document.createElement("section");
document.createElement("footer");
document.createElement("article");
document.createElement("nav");
document.createElement("hgroup");
</script><![endif]-->

With the above CSS and JavaScript, just remember to add all the tags you’re using.

Now we’ve got the layout tags working, but the new content tags, like <video> and <canvas>, still will not work.To get these tags to function, your user needs a new browser. Give them a user-friendly message to tell them they are missing out, and someday maybe they’ll listen.

3. MOBILE DEVICE PROBLEMS

The big problem here is many older mobile devices do not/improperly handle JavaScript, so your <IE9 fix above may not work for them. If you’re seriously worried about this, you’re probably better off detecting and redirecting mobile devices to a mobile optimized webpage or subsite. You’re server can handle this using the http request information, so it:

Doesn’t require JavaScript;
Doesn’t require a round-trip to determine that the client is a mobile device;
The user sees a great mobile website.

If you don’t have time, money, or the will to make a mobile, you can experiment with simply wrapping HTML5 tags around your existing layout tags. For example:

<ul class="menu">
<li>One</li>
<li>Two</li>
<li>Three</li>
</ul>

Becomes:

<nav>
<ul class="menu">
<li>One</li>
<li>Two</li>
<li>Three</li>
</ul>
</nav>

THE RESULT: If the mobile device doesn’t know the <nav> tag, then it should disregard it. Since your styling is on the <ul>, and not the <nav> tag, your document should work either way. Of course, this is going to take some trial/error/review with a number of mobile devices.

MY ADVICE: Take the plunge and build a mobile subsite. In the long run, it will provide less head-aches and a better user experience.

CONCLUSION

When it comes to SEO, there’s lots of things to worry about, but HTML5 isn’t one of them, at least not with Google. Take the plunge and have fun developing in HTML5.

Happy HTML5ing,
James Fielding

Google SEO Checklist

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:00:00 -0500

Here's a quick checklist to improve your Google ranking:

A great SEO plan starts with choosing the right keywords. Develop a good keyword list for each page that will lead searchers to your site. Two good resources are Google’s Keyword Tool and Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. Both tools are actually for search engine marketing (i.e. Pay-per-Click advertising), but the keyword information they provide is invaluable to SEO, too.
Use the keywords list from above to pepper your <title> and <meta name="description"> tags. NOTE: Both these tags should be human-readable descriptive statements; don’t use these as keyword dumping grounds. Don’t use any more than 80 characters in the title tag and 200 characters maximum in the description tag.
If you feel you must list keywords in your head section, use the <meta name="keywords"> tag; its SEO usefulness is questionable, but you’re not going to be penalized for it as long as you use a small, targeted list (10 words or less).
Moving into the <body> of your document, make sure your page’s one <h1> tag has your most important keywords and use <h2> tags to support your keywords, where appropriate.
If you have an existing site, fire up your favourite browser, and do the following search (of course, substituting your site's name) using your targeted search engine:
```
SITE:yoursite.com -SITE:www.yoursite.com
```
This search queries specifically for your site and uses an exclusion filter (“-SITE:”) to remove all indexed results that include the "www." subdomain in your URL. If you get results (which can include URLs in subdomains other than "www."), you may be splitting your hard-earned ranking between URLs. If so, look at canonicalizing your site (using IIS or Apache) to consolidate the URL variations.
Make sure that your site and sitemaps are submitted to the main search engine webmaster tools ( Google, Bing and Yahoo), then review and correct errors as they come up. This is really important: 404 (i.e. Page not found) errors, particularly if they are directly off your sitemap, are going to hurt your rankings. Using your server’s URL rewrite engine (IIS or Apache) will really help to redirect these problem pages back to content on your site.
Test your HTML markup with the W3C Markup Validation Service page. I’m often surprised by the problems that slip through my web development tools. Fortunately, W3C’s details usually make these problems easy to resolve.
Finally, when in doubt, review webmaster guidelines for Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Happy Google SEOing,
James Fielding

Open external links in a new window: Add target="_blank" using jQuery

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:32:00 -0500

When it comes to site optimization, there's always lots to do. Richard Florance has a great post on making ASP.NET sites run more efficiently. One thing that Richard doesn't talk about is on the client-side, specifically using jQuery (or JavaScript) to add repetitive, non-critical, page elements and attributes. Here's a quick tip that you can use to reduce a page's size: Add target="_blank" to <a> tags using jQuery.

$("a").filter(function () {
        return this.hostname && this.hostname !== location.hostname;
    }).each(function () {
        $(this).attr({
            target: "_blank",
            title: "Visit " + this.href + " (click to open in a new window)"
        });
    });

The above code filters all the hyperlink tags by hostname, and then adds a target="_blank" as well as a title attribute to each external link. If you don't like the title attribute, change or remove it. You could also take this one step further and add a css class or image/styling directly to each external link to identify them as external (although you could accomplish this using straight css, too); I'll leave this to you.

Of course, to implment this, you'll likely want to add this jQuery code snippet to your global $(document).ready function, and you'll need to referrence the jQuery library in your HTML. If you're new to jQuery, check out this tutorial to get you started.

The nice thing about this approach is that the snippet can be added to an existing site in a matter of minutes. Obviously, you don't want to use this method to add mission critical elements/attributes to your site, unless you can ensure that every user will have JavaScript enabled.

Happy External Linking,
James Fielding

Corporate Color Palette: 10 Free Online Color Tools

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:39:00 -0500

Intro | Part 1

A common color question for a web designer, at least where I live in Muskoka, is, "What tools do you use to build a website's color palette?"

Obviously a shelf of Microsoft and Adobe development tools helps a professional designer "play ball". But more and more, I find myself pulling up some really great online resources...and all are free. Now it used to mean that, at least in the design world, "free" was synonomous with "crappy". Not any more. Here are 10 Free Online Color Palette Tools that will help you knock your website's color scheme out of the park:

1. Colour Lovers Trends – If you are shopping for a color palette, this is the place to start.

Pros: Expansive and regularly updated Trends list of live A+ designed websites to peruse, complete with each site’s color palette.

Cons: Sciosoft Systems website hasn’t been included in the Trends list, yet.

2. Kuler from Adobe – For me, when I’m building up a color palette, I almost always start at Kuler.

Pros: Integrated into Adobe Studio, which is a big plus for workflow. Intuitive user interface. Big color blocks make it easier to get a good feel for your palette, and what message it conveys to the viewer, partcularily when using it in area fills.

Cons: Unless you're importing your palette into an Adobe product, your post palette creation options are limited.

3. Color Explorer: Color Matching – Color Explorer is actually a comprehensive set of color tools. Sadly, I only have space to highlight the three tools I use most, but in sum total it’s an impressive package. As with most things in life, with many features comes added complexity. As such, Color Explorer has a bit of a learning curve (e.g. if you have a #hex color in mind you need to add it to you color palette in “Color Picker” tab before you can use it “Color Matching” tab.) Having said this, Color Explorer is a great package and well worth the small investment in time it will take to start producing amazing color palettes.

Pros: Excellent proprietary palette generation algorithms in addition to the standard color theory algorithms (i.e. complementary, single hue, triadic, etc.). Intuitive and easy to transition to other color tools. Adding colors or removing a single color from your custom palette (as you build it up) is easy and all done within Color Explorer, so there is no need to use another program to piece palettes together. Created palettes can output in a variety of file formats including Adobe and standard PNG.

Cons: Cannot enter #hex colors directly into Color Matching (must be entered in Color Picker). First time users may find it challenging to find a particular color tool, although each tool itself has an identifyable purpose and is easy to use.

4. Color Explorer: Image Color Import – Have you ever wanted to capture the color palette from a photograph. Look no further than Color Explorer’s Image Color Import tool.

Pros: Fast, really fast...less than a minute to generate a color palette from an image file.

Cons: Not 100% foolproof. Sometimes you’ll need to increase the number of colors returned to get all the colors that you want (although you can edit the palette post import). Maximum file size upload is 250K.

5. Color Explorer: Contrast Analysis – Ever wondered if your new website’s viewers will be able to read your content if you use a specific color? Not only does Color Explorer’s Contrast Analysis tell you, it gives you a nice report to present to your boss, justifying your decision.

Pros: Quickly test/compare color combinations for optimal readability and conformance to the accessibility standards.

Cons: High standards conformance doesn’t necessarily equal great color palette. Remember, a straight black & white palette is going to give you the highest possible contrast rating, but it probably isn’t the best palette.

6. Aviary: Color Swatches – If you are looking for a powerful set of free imaging tools, Aviary Tools are for you. The truth is, some of these tools should be paid for...they are just that high a quality...don’t tell Aviary that, though.

Pros: Color generation algorithms are highly adjustable through the use of UI sliders. Really easy to get a palette with multiple colors that you really want. Pixilation feature for on image color import is a handy for isolating colors on an imported image.

Cons: Tools require multiple clicks to launch...OK, I'm being really picky here, but it might be confusing for first time users. Image Color importer only allows manual color selection (it would be nice to see an automatic capture, too).

7. Color Scheme Designer – Don’t let the simple UI layout fool you. When it comes to building color palettes, Color Scheme Designer is a serious contender.

Pros: Simple & efficient user interface. Outputs color palette to sample webpages to help you envision colors in layout. Palette export is comprehensive. Easy to cycle between palette generation algorithms.

Cons: Palette adjustment is buried and not overly intuitive.

8. ColoRotate – If there was ever a prize for reenvisioning a user interface for color tools, it should go to ColoRotate.

Pros: Innovative user interface allows you to visualize and put together great color combinations (particularly in the similar hue range) that you would not get using other color tools. An experienced user can get unique results.

Cons: Innovation is a double-edged sword: For new users, ColoRotate can seem unwieldy.

9. Color Wizard – This straight-forward color palette tool is simple to use, and easy to produce a palette.

Pros: Arguably the easiest color palette tool (in this list) to use. Allows you to enter a #hex color, make some adjustments, and then reset back to your entered color with a single click.

Cons: Limited functionality outside making basic palettes. Doesn’t appear to be any export feature for palette.

10. Colour Lovers: Copaso – Another color palette tool, Colour Lover’s Copaso allows you to easily piece together colors into a custom palette.

Pros: Well laid out user interface is intuitive to use. Advanced and Simple modes is a nice touch .

Cons: Some features (like Import From A Photo) require you to create an account.

Hopefully some of these great online color tools will fit the bill in you next project, or at least help get you started. Let me know what you think. NOTICE: My comments are as-of-post-date, but obviously these tools will evolve. If you think I need to make any updates, please email me.

Happy Color Tooling,
James Fielding

Corporate Color Palette: Choosing your company's color scheme

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:11:00 -0500

Intro | Part 1

In web design, particularly for business, a design consideration that is usually top-of-mind for the designer is choosing the right color palette. Interestingly, the color scheme selection for the client is often relatively low on priority list, usually well behind layout and design elements.

I’m no Ph.D. in color psychology, but I’d be willing to bet this juxtaposition is because a client is often looking at the blank website canvas and saying, “What’s the overall impression we’re aiming for?” Meanwhile, the designer is thinking, “How do we start building pieces to get the overall impression we’re aiming for?” The bottom line is that the client and designer have the same end goal, just different entry points.

A car mechanic understands how to repair cars – not by seeing the car as a single system but as a complex interaction of individual systems – building a website is no different. Color sets the tone, and leads to an overall theme for the site, which gives rise to eye-catching design elements that are laid out to form your TOTALLY AWSOME & AMAZING website. It’s just that easy, right?

Over the next few articles I’m going to delve into choosing a corporate color palette. My hope is to help your company pick a color scheme that works for you, and your customers. I’m gearing this series towards clients (meaning you’ll be hiring someone to build the website for you), but hopefully designers can pick up some tips along the way, too.

COLOR vs. COLOUR DISCLAIMER: Yes, I am Canadian. And yes, I’m supposed to spell color with a “u”. Unfortunately, if you are Canadian or English, most graphic design programs use the American spelling for color, so for the purposes of this series of articles, I’ll use the American spelling, although I reserve the right to throwing in the occasional “u”... this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

Happy Corporate Coloring,
James Fielding

Sciosoft Systems: Muskoka Web Design & Development Specialists in Central Ontario

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:13:00 -0500

Well, as you can see, we've done a revise on our main website's design theme, as well as matched the new theme to this blog. So let me be the first to say, "Welcome, Welcome, Welcome."

ASP.NET 4, MVC, jQuery, CSS3, HTML5...all the good (and buzz wordy) stuff; we've packed it all in there. It's been a bit of a, "Do what you preach," exercise for us.

We've also introducing our new tag:

Sciosoft Systems: Muskoka Web Design & Development Specialists in Central Ontario

Let me know what you think of our new theme and tag.

Happy Viewing,

James Fielding

Meta Keyword & Description in ASP.NET MVC via Master Pages

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:00:00 -0500

As of late, we've been trying to do some optimization on our ASP.NET MVC base projects that are the starting point for client builds. It is obvious that having META tags, particularly "Description" and "Keywords", on the .aspx pages of our sites is important. Moreover, the content of the tags has to be easily added to and/or updated on any given view's .aspx page.

As you're undoubtedly aware after Googling this topic, most online help will have you instantiate an BaseViewData class on your Master page or write tags by implementing some variance of a base Page/Interface/Abstract class.

After experimenting with a number of these methods, I concluded that the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) principle should apply.

The bottom line is this: Save your sanity, and be thanked by the next guy that has to work on your project. Add a MetaContent <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> to your Site.Master page and be done with it.

When you start a new MVC site, the Site.Master head section should look like this:

<head runat="server">
    <title>
        <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" />
    </title>
</head>

We're going to add another <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> that contains some default values, but will allow us to overwrite these values as needed. We do this by adding the following snippet below the title element:

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="MetaContent" runat="server" >
<meta name="description" content="Web solutions for everyone" />
<meta name="keywords" content="muskoka web design" />
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

Not only does this placeholder write some default values on pages that we don't specifically overwrite, but the placeholder will be automatically added to any new views that we create in our project. Also, any views that have already been created won't be broken by messing around with the TitleContent placeholder.

BONUS TIP: To complete the title element, I want to add a static string to the end of every page's title. To do this, I need to add a literal:

You may think that you could have just added a string instead of the <asp:Literal>, and you'd be wrong...been there, done that. ASP is looking for controls, so any strings you put in are overwritten. Fortunately, a control implementing a string is not.

So our modified Master Page head section looks like this:

Now, when you want to override a particular view page, you just need to add the desired metatags:

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MetaContent" runat="server">
<meta name="description" content="Different Description" />
<meta name="keywords" content="different, keywords" />
</asp:Content>

The major benefit of using this, over other techniques, is that you can drop in the above code into an existing site, and it won't break anything. Moreover, it is easy for the next guy to see what you are doing, it keeps the meta tags in the view were they are easily to find and edit, and the technique is easily portable between projects.

Happy Metatagging,
James Fielding

Hosting Your Server: Dedicated vs. Colocation

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:21:00 -0500

As hardware costs drop, and the need to control IT costs increases, we’ve noticed that colocation is becoming a viable option for many small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). Whether you're using a Microsoft or Linux-based system, here’s the bottom line:

Dedicated server(s): You’re renting servers from someone on a server-by-server basis.

With dedicated servers, you pay a premium for not worrying about the hardware: If there are any hardware issues, someone else replaces/fixes it.

Colocation: You’re renting space for your server from someone.

In the case of colocation, you get an allotted amount of physical space in a facility that provides your hardware with power and bandwidth, as well as an ideal environment (e.g. climate control, power supply management, facility security), but what you put in your space is up to you.

What’s Best for You?

Of course, there’s no "one-size-fits-all" answer, but here are some things to consider:

In general, for short-term projects (less than a year), dedicated servers are cheaper and easier. But if your hosting requirements are more than two years in duration, you’ll likely see significant cost-savings in going with colocation.
In the past, it used to be that if you needed only one or two servers, and after factoring for Microsoft license costs, you were left with the non-choice choice: You went dedicated. But today, with MS Small Business Server, and Essential Business Server being really cost-effective alternatives for SMB, we’ve seen a dramatic shift. Now, you can run a Small or Essential Business Server offsite using colocation, which is something that many dedicated server providers won't do for you. This has dramatically shifted the landscape for SMBs looking to implement MS server solutions.
Also, a lot depends on your technical experience and abilities. If you, or a member of your team, is comfortable with computers, then colocation is a reasonable choice. If you know and/or care little about servers, switches, networking, and firewalls, then you may need to factor in the cost of outsourcing this portion of your IT administration.
Finally, if you want to have physical access to your machine, then colocation is the obvious answer for you.

Other Things to Consider

There are a couple of points-of-confusion that seem to always come up in the dedicated versus colocation debate. Here's some clarification:

Bandwidth

This probably causes the most confusion when comparing dedicated to colocation. When you’re coming from managed hosting, you’re used to thinking about your bandwidth quota as the total transfer limit for the month calculated in gigabytes (GB). Denoting bandwidth usage this way helps non-network-savvy people understand exactly how much data they can move in a month, but as a network administrator, you’re really concerned with the amount of data moving through your pipe at any given second, or your Mbit/s rate.

As such, when you move into colocation, the provider sells you bandwidth based on how they're billed - per mbps transferred, typically measured using 95th percentile billing (see below). So, given a colocation 1 Mbit/s transfer rate, and having it running at the limit each second for a month, you’d theoretically end up with:

(1,000,000 / 8bits * 60s * 60m * 24h * 30.5days) / 1,000,000,000 = ~330GB/month

“But what about 1Mbit/s actually equalling 1024Kbit/s,” you say? Well, as it turns out in data communications, signal pulses and have historically been counted using the decimal number system, so a megabit is 1,000,000 bits and a kilobit is 1,000 bits.
Of course, colocation bandwidth limits apply to metered usage accounts. Some providers have unmetered bandwidth, which comes with a price tag to match this convenience.

95th Percentile Billing

The 95th percentile is the mathematical calculation most widely used to determine billings for variable rate or "burstable" network bandwidth connections. It works like this:

You subscribe to a colocation service that includes a network bandwidth allowance stated in Mbit/s. As such, you’re permitted to consume as much bandwidth as you wish up to this limit. Since most networks are oversubscribed, there is often some room for some bursting without advanced planning, when it comes time to bill you for your usage, your provider ignores the top 5% of your peak usage, and bills your bandwidth transfer rate at the 95th Percentile.

As long as your 95th Percentile transfer rate is at or below your bandwidth allowance, there are no additional fees. If, however, you exceed your allowance then you are invoiced for the additional bandwidth you consume.

For example, for 100 transfer rate samples, if the top 10 records were:

Top 10 Records	Sample Rate	Comment
100	2180 Kbps	Ignored (top 5%)
99	1970 Kbps	Ignored (top 5%)
98	1800 Kbps	Ignored (top 5%)
97	1560 Kbps	Ignored (top 5%)
96	940 Kbps	Ignored (top 5%)
95	920 Kbps	95th Percentile
94	880Kbps
93	850 Kbps
92	780 Kbps
91	720 Kbps

In this case, even though you sometimes sustained traffic at speeds as high as 2180 Kbps, your actual 95th percentile consumption was 920 Kbps. If your subscription included 1Mbit/s of network traffic then your usage is below your subscription allowance.

Hopefully this overview will help you implement the best hosting solution for your business.

Happy Hosting,
James Fielding