Ok here is an interesting question. I have a customer who last month used up approximately 3GIG of bandwidth in 4 days with an extremely effective newsletter campaign. He had about 65,000 hits during that period. He just informed me that he is going to run a much larger similar campaign where if the response rate is the same he could get 500,000 hits in 3-4 days (with say 300,000 in a single day). According to my calculations that suggests he might need as much as 24GIG of bandwidth during that 4 day period if his predictions are correct!

Sooo I have a couple of questions. I of course understand that the real answer may be "it depends" and that such factors as how many other accounts take up resources, etc. The good news is that he does not have a bunch of CGI scripts to run it is a basic static html site. The bad news is the Alabanza server is not dedicated solely to this account. Here are the questions:

1) Can a typical server from Alabanza handle that amount
of traffic at least in theory for a short period of
time?

2) If not could the bandwidth demands be split between
two servers using additional dns entries?

3) Can Alabanza make short term modifications to the
server to handle the bandwidth?

4) If no to the above should I go with a dedicated
server just for that brief period? It would seem
to me that the bandwidth issue could be solved based
on the demand but I am real worried about the server
crashing.

Anyways I would appreciate any sage advice on what to do. I have about 14 days to solve this problem and the last thing I want to see is the server crash during this campaign. Thanks!

I would say 24gig in 4 days could be handled if the server wasnt being shared by other sites and if the server has plenty of RAM.

It should be the only one site in one box.
I'm sure Xeon 800Mhz, 1 Gigs RAM, SCSI HD and Gigabit Ethernet Card will serve the docs smoothly.

Are Alabanza hosts able record the outgoing e-mails such as newsletters? I thought it was just HTTP/FTP transfer, if so the guys getting away with murder (so to speak) :).

Unfortunately it is in a shared environment although I do not think the server is in any way overloaded (right now) The configuration is 512K RAM and 550 PIII. What if I set up a second mirror site with another host and added the additional dns entries to my domain name? As I understand it the secondary DNS entries pick up if the primary becomes unavailable. Course if the first is unavailable then I will have overloaded the primary account which effects everybody else if I am correct. Any other ideas? Perhaps set up a new account just for this brief period?

Sorry I should have been more clear. This is a large advertising campaign being done by an advertising company my client has hired (think big name web site with huge subscriber list). The e-mail will be going out as part of their newsletter NOT through Alabanza's servers!

what exactly do you want
1) sending out the email through the servers
2) or just receiving the responses through visits to their/your website?

if 1) you can split the email into multiple packages, spread over the 3-4 days
if 2) I would suggest a load balanced system. the visitors are not spread throughout 24 hours, you will have huge peak times, and you should be able to handle this.

Ok I am not sending out anything I am expecting a large increase in traffic to the server as people respond to the e-mail. The load will occur over a 72 hour period with a potential 500,000 visitors during this period. Based on previous campaign I can expect upto 300,000 visitors within the first 24 hours. So what I am trying to prepare for is this increase in traffic so that the account handles the traffic without taking the server down.

As an addendum I have zero experience in load balancing so suggestions on that topic would be greatly appreciated!

That server could easily handle 100+gb a month assuming its not an overly intensive cgi site. There's plenty of ram and if I'm not mistaken alabanza servers run with SCSI drives.

HOWEVER don't forget that Alabanza bandwidth costs like $10 a gb once you pass your limit.

Thanks! Yep I am well aware of the bandwidth overage charges and my client is willing to pay the fees. I was/am primarily concerned with server stability. I know they can handle the traffic when it is spread out over a month but this is the biggest potential hit within a 72 hour period. Kinda like being on CNN (ok perhaps not that bad)

Only thing that might cause a problem is the smaller CPU but everything else should be fine.

Your server should be fine. Depends whether you have static or dynamic pages. For static pages it's fine. but just turn your log files to a minimum (unless you want user tracking), they can grow very fast and slow down the system significantly. And don't forget to modify your webserver (eg. apache) to handle enough simultaneous requests.

Is it a dedicated server?

You can also use squid as a cache.

armin

are you kidding?
I'm doing 20 GB a day on Apache on a P III 450 with 256 RAM.
And logs are turned on (I log client ip, referal, request page and other minor things).

You need less then 10 GB a day, I do not see the big deal.



[Edited by energy on 01-31-2001 at 06:59 PM]

Thanks energy! Sorry about the ignorance but I have not had a single site get this kind of traffic before so I figured asking the more experienced folks would be wise so there are no problems.

I would not look at server speeds (how fast it is) but at bandwidth. I am sure a P 200 with 64 MB of ram would have no problem handling that much traffic at all, or that much emailing. You need to make sure you have at least a 1 MBit/s dedicated line. 24 GB over 4 days is not that much bandwidth to handle, I had one of my customers using 70 GB a day on one of our machines :).


James R. Clark II
Nethosters Inc.
http://www.nethosters.com