What would be the minium connection needed for a website?I am considering hosting a few select web sites for free as I know how hard it can be finding a free host which offers a good service so Im going to try starting on my own.
I wont have many sites, just about 20 at first but if people like the service i will expand but not like the normal free ones which offer really bad service and speed.
I would like to get a connection which is afordable but also will give a good enough speed, plz bear in mind that im doing it for free so i dont want the fastest connection out...
thanks

You probably don't want to host sites in-house. You're better off collocating in a data center. You'll pay much less and get much better bursting capabilties.

T1 - $700 to $1,600/mo
DS3 - $25,000 to $45,000/mo
OC3 - $hahahahaha/mo

price changes by location

still wanna do it for free?

your better off co-lo'ing but even that is not cheap

10 Mbps
--
Yipes = $3,000

45 Mbps
-
Sprint = $11,000
ATT = $12,000
UUNet = $14,000
C&W = $14,000

100 Mbps
--
Cogent = $1,000
Verio $10,000
Qwest $19,000

Those are some prices the best I can remember, but I make no claim to their authenticity, just found them out through the grape vine. So unless your rich... give it up? Or consider buying a shared hosting account and giving away free hosting www.you.com/them or them.you.com, which you can do with a cpanel host if it's not against their rules. ( They need to give ftp accounts ) It's also possible on a RAQ host and would be much more realistic. Pay $25 a month and offer 10-20 people free hosting.

what kind of speed would each website need?

Guys,

If your looking at hosting something like a few small sites, and they dont need the 100% uptime, then all you gotta do is get a server online.

Then you can just go out and get a DSL connection for like $60/month and get 2 IP addresses.

After you have done that, get a router, connect it to your computer and DSL line, and you have a server online.

Now, you will probably get like 600k down, 128k upload (upload is for the servers.)

If you wanted to get a better uptime percent, you could get a ISDN line which could cost like $200/month, but it will give you an extra 64k-128k connection, and that way you only need 1 IP from your DSL and 1 IP from your ISDN. Use both IPs under your name servers.

You should be good to go then, remember to get a UPS unit too :)


Good Luck,


Jim