thinking about using x company's colo services, but they sell thier access as kilobits per second. my server uses about 50GB to 100GB of bandwidth per month and i need to know what is the exact equation for calculating or conversion method i should use to calc my est. bandwidth usage. if someone can please give me the mathematical expression? thanks for any help :confused:
deeboy

It depends. Is it a capped line? Or measured by average (actual) usage? Or by 95th percentile?

i'm not very good at this
but i know that 128kilobits = 16 kilobytes.
How? 128 divided by 8

---i hope none of the following is wrong, im sorry if it is--

So if you wanted to know how much 16kiloBYTES was in kiloBITS, you would do 16 times 8. Gives you 128.

1000k - 1mb
10,000k - 10mb
100,000k - 100mb
1,000,000 - 1gig
50,000,000 - roughly 50 gigs.
So, i guess it's 50,000,000 times 8 = 400000000 KILOBITS

Now converting that to megabits LOL dont ask me

-node

they use the 95% method.

deeboy,

If your site have irregular pattern of visitors, dont get a host that charges you by line speed. This is because during your peak times, you capped lined speed will not be able to handle to the load and slows down your site. If you pay for more speed, you will be wasting your money during non peak hours. Go with a host that lets you BURST and limits you on the data transfer. And a host that calculate data transfered on ACTUAL data transfer and not the 95% percentile method!

To answer your question above, here are the info ...

128kbps = 40.5 GB
256kbps = 81.0 GB
384kbps = 121.5 GB
512kbps = 162.0 GB
768kbps = 243.0 GB

The above figures is the MAXIMUM transfer achieveable if your server keeps utilising the speed every seconds of the month. Thus in reality, the figures are much lower ...

And the maths equation is =

x * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 (or 31 days) / 8 * 1024 * 1024

where x is the speed in kbps

i agree with DJ. You will be paying money for nothing if you have traffic on particular hrs. In traffy hrs access to your server will be slow. and at the times when somebody is downloading emails and uploading some files access will be very slow. go for hosting company which offers you burst bandwidth.