I'm starting up a web hosting operation. And I'm trying to do some planning about how many customers, or more specifically what kind of load our servers are going to be able to handle.

We're using dual proc Intel/Linux machines with 1Gb of memory and a pair of 40Gb EIDE disks. I would like to know what Gb throughput we could expect when the box is loaded with enough customers to keep the machine busy.

Obviously, mileages may vary depending on page sizes, use of perl, PHP, MySQL, etc. But I'm really just after a ball park number.

Anyone here care to contribute some figures (server type, Gb transferred, "typical usage profile", number of sites on server)

Thanks!

There's really no way to give a ballpark figure without knowing what the average size, popularity of the sites you will be hosting are. You could easily push over 500GB bandwidth per month off of one server with just a few high traffic sites. On the other hand you could get only 50GB per month if you have a whole bunch of low traffic sites, that are eating up system resources.

The best thing to do, is sit down and figure out what type of packages you will be hosting. Then based on the disk space, and estimated system resources, you can get a rough idea for how much traffic you can handle.

-Dan

I understand.

How about tacking a different tack. If people total us the Gb transfers allocated to the customers on their box, how does this compare to the Gb transferred on the box?

Bandwith costs seem like they will dwarf all our other costs and I want to make sure I've got a good handle on typical (that word again) shared hosting usage.