I have a pretty interesting question to which I have no answer whatsoever.

How much incoming traffic must an average server endure in coparision to outgoing traffic? By an average server I mean a web server, serving clients, web pages, downloads, no web storage warehouses, no anonymus FTP sites.

If there would be 5GB incoming traffic, how much would there be outgoung traffic? My crude estimate would be 1 to 10 ratio...?

And another thing - how would you accurately measure such traffic? At the router?

Although this question might seem odd, it's important to me...

Thanks :cool: ,
Ales

Our incoming is anywhere from 20-25% of our outgoing traffic, on average. It's measured at the router. Usually providers don't charge for incoming traffic (all the ones I've talked to don't, anyway).

Hope that helps. :)

Here's some numbers which might help you, produced by comparing bsdwebhosting.net's HTTP and MRTG logs:

For every 1GB of files served, there is
1135MB of HTTP/TCP/IP traffic out
105MB of HTTP/TCP/IP traffic in
55MB of other traffic out
95MB of other traffic in

So in total for every 1GB of data served there is 1.18GB of packets travelling out, and 0.2GB of packets travelling in.

I have no idea if these numbers are typical, but I see no reason to suspect otherwise.

Thanks guys, that's exactly what I needed to know.

So it's more like 1:4,5 to 5,5. Oh, well, I would have preferred if it would be 1:10.

Otherwise, the only provider that I know who is charging for both incoming and outgoing traffic is Venturesonline.com, if you have between 50 and 150 GB traffic on their dedicated server.

But that's not why I needed the info... I stumbled on a collocation provider in Europe that charges by the incoming traffic only. Outgoing is free... Go figure....

Ales

But, as you said yourself, and have other's, it's depedant on what your site runs. It is possible to have a 1:10 ratio, it just depends. But, it's better to be as realistic as possible and always drop a couple of numbers just to be sure in theory.