ZoneEdit claims that most web sites use less than 5MB of DNS traffic per year and that even the busiest sites will never use more than 250MB in a year. Is this accurate?

Sounds about right, eh?

Rough rule of thumb: count how many unique visitors you get each day and mutiply by 5kB and you'll have a good guess at your annual DNS bandwidth. Most web sites have less than 1000 unique visitors per day, so ZE is certainly right there... but the busiest sites certainly have more than 50,000 unique visitors per day, so I'd have to disagree with the second number.

Yep that sounds about right... as I have watched my customers its kind of funny how many want unlimited space thinking that they need it.

But most of them are under 200 - 300 MB per month

k9brian just in case you missed it (which I feel you may have), the thread is about DNS traffic.

Originally posted by cperciva
Rough rule of thumb: count how many unique visitors you get each day and mutiply by 5kB and you'll have a good guess at your annual DNS bandwidth. Most web sites have less than 1000 unique visitors per day, so ZE is certainly right there... but the busiest sites certainly have more than 50,000 unique visitors per day, so I'd have to disagree with the second number.

But are they all hitting your dns servers? If everyone in my office looks at your web page right now is your dns server going to get over 300 queries from our dns server?

I honestly don't know how dns servers communicate with each other, but I always assumed that there was some caching. IE if many people who use the same local nameserver are hitting the same external site, the nameserver will cache the address for a certain period of time to avoid having to look it up every 30 seconds. Can anyone tell me if this is how it works, or if I'm just on crack?

-joe