I have been asking a few questions about bandwidth lately. Unfortunately, I have not received much helpful information :(. I am trying model some estimates of bandwidth requerements for a service I am developing. It is not web hosting but we will be offering email forwarding under an alias@ourdomainname.com for our members.

Here is another question. I hope you can provide some useful info. For those hosts that are hosting "small-time" virtual server accounts - what is the average bandwidth you need to allow for each of these accounts for email transportation? I just need some rough ideas to plug into my figures.

Thanks :)

I'm not sure if this will help you, however I have taken some Transfer stats from a couple of our servers. May help you determin web/e-mail ratio. (If that helps at all :)


Server Transfer : 5.8 Gig/daily
E-mail transfer: 15 Megs/Daily


Server Transfer: 4.4 Gig/Daily
E-mail transfer: 1 Meg/ Daily

These two servers are just hosting Virtual accounts, nothing too large. May help you out. Sorry if they don't :|

Thanks thats a great help. Sounds like each virtual account is averaging out at about 1-2 MB per month for email. I pulled a wild figure of about 2 MB per member out of the air myself when doing some rough figures. Thanks again.

Having lots of users just sending normal email won't use any significant bandwidth.

What will throw things off is if you get a couple users who like forwarding/receiving attachments all the time. They add up quickly. One user sending a 500K attachment to 50 friends = 25MB of bandwidth. Get 20 people like that, and you're using 500MB a day in bandwidth.

So it can vary a lot. Jason's stats sound pretty accurate, maybe a tad on the low side.

Planet Z

Those are actual stats, So for us they are exact and not on the low side :) .. However you are dead correct. It is possible to get users that transfer tons of traffic over e-mail . However from our experences over the past year and a half. It does not happen very often. At least on our services. But it does happen :)

I'd hope they'd be accurate for you ;)

I meant they may be a little on the low side overall for virtual hosting servers. :stickout

How did you generate those stats anyway? I've never attempted to check the bandwidth usage of email on our virtual servers. It'd be interesting to see what it was.

The stats I showed you where off a few Cobalt servers. Those are built into it .. However I know felix is in the middle of designing stats for the Web.cp .. that monitor e-mail. However not sure how he is doing it :)