I was discussing the bandwith usage of a dedicated server that was going to be used for hosting with a salesman from alabanza. He said that each server package comes with 50gigs per month bandwith. With the price they are charging for the server it equals $8 per gig.

I did some number crunching and found that if people were using most of the bandwith I allowed them to have I would be loosing my but off.

I asked him how jumpline.com was offering the following packages (they use alabanza):
$14.95 with 3gigs/mth
$24.95 with 5gigs/mth
$34.95 with 7gigs/mth

At that rate thery are selling the initial package at $5 per gig. Now if most of the clients used nowhere near their limits then you could make a profit. They said this is usually the case but I have my doughts.

My question is how much can I expect my clients to use of their allowed bandwith on average?

Although I'm not an Alabanza host, all but 3 of my clients use under 1gb bandwidth per month :).

I am an Alabanza based host :) and that is typical. Also, remember that the "bandwidth" is actual transfer, not by the "95th percentile rule" so it is not actually that expensive. I have clients that use under 100 meg per month. Most are well under 1 gig.

We are also an Alabanza host and also find that most clients don't use their bandwidth allotment per month. If you have enough clients you may very well reach 50gigs a month but for most clients it should not be a problem.