Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : bandwidth help needed

this webhosting stuff is just way more complicated than I thought but...

Ok I'm starting my own little hosting company at home...it's a wireless network(only high speed access availible). Well the costs run starting at 200/mo for a 384Kbps up/dn connection...

I figure I can start at that level and upgrade as needed (it can scale up to 11mbps) but realistly how man sites can I host at 384kbps?

Using some basic math I figured out that a 384Kbps connection is the equivlent to 120gig/mo. And at like 2-4 gig/mo transfer per site(I figure that's more than plenty for most sites) I sould be able to host around 30(120/4)-60(120/2) sites.

So is my thinking correct or am I oversimplifing this way too much... after all that's assume transfer are distributed evenly over the month, when It will probabbly be very spiked durring the day and quiet at night...

please can someone help me figure this stuff out?

[inwks]

Bandwidth per month = (line speed / 8) * (60x60x24x30.4)

For example: line speed = 128Kbits/s means that bandwidth per month = (128 / 8) * (60x60x24x30.4) = 16 * 2626560 = 42,024,960Kbytes = 42Gb per month approx.

However, this assumes your line is running at 100% all the time, which is unrealistic. Also, the other part of the equation is the number of concurrent users on the connection before they experience degradation in speed due to your connection.

Therefore, as a very basic example, assume everyone is able to sustain a continuous 28kbits/s on a modem to your site. This gives 384/28 concurrent users = 14ish.

This is a very basic simplification. There is a whitepaper somewhere on the Microsoft site on how to estimate required bandwidth.

[MikeA]

Another thing to remember is that assuming that sites will use 2 to 4 GB of bandwidth is incorrect, drop that amount downd to less than 1 GB per site.


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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com

thanks guys! I'll go look around the MS site for that whitepaper...

Why do you say this assumes it run at 100% when you are dividing it by 8, surely this assumes it is running at 12.5%.

Originally posted by Admin:
Why do you say this assumes it run at 100% when you are dividing it by 8, surely this assumes it is running at 12.5%.

you divide by 8 becuase they measure bandwith in kilobits so take kilobits / 8(number of bits in 1 byte) to get how many kilobytes it is... than you multiply by 2626560(number of seconds in a month) to get how many kilobytes/mo you can transfer...

Wow,

128kbps now seems crap. So it's really 16 kilobytes per second, my modem faster than that (well in theory). Then you consider that traffic drops by upto 60% at night, and peaks at certain hours. Then you consider that whether you server any sites or not you still use bandwidth as the network monitors your server and checks it's there. What about transfer for the requests and the additional information sent with a web page. For a example what does a 24kb graphic total, considering the browser request and the packet information sent with it, I bet it adds up. How can you tell if somethings in kilobits or kilobytes, do they both use kbps.

[MikeA]

I was wondering where that 60x60x.... equation came from.


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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com

[inwks]

You normally add about 10-15% for the overhead of the TCP/IP and HTTP protocols, including requests.

It depends on the way you have TCP/IP setup on the server on client. You can reduce the overhead by changing the setting for how often it has to checkpoint the data sent so far.

[inwks]

Hmmm....You're modem's worse - its also in kilobits. All bandwidth is measured in bits, including LANs. Space, e.g. disk space, is usually in bytes, kilobytes, etc. The reason is 8 bits = 1 word, or something like that, something deeply historical.

Therefore a 56Kbit/s modem = 7 kbytes/s.

As a personal preference, I wouldn't host anysite on less than 256Kbit/s. And only if it was a very small site in terms of visitors per day. The problem with bandwidth is not the amount you can transfer in a month, its the perception of speed for the end user.

Imagine, if you will, that you have just created a business-2-business portal to sell widgets that sit in the bottom of beer cans, and your market is all the brewery's in Europe. Imagine that the purchasing departments of each brewery is connected to the net on a 128Kbit ISDN line. You send out a mailer that results in 50 of the purchasers hitting your site at 9am on a Monday morning. To enable them to connect at their full bandwidth (assume no other bottlenecks between their PC and your server), you would need 50x128Kbit line or 6.4Mbit/s. Naturally, this is unrealistic, and probably cost prohibitive (how many 0.5p widgets do you need to sell just to pay for the line!). Therefore, you have to set a target that seems reasonable.

Your target would work somewhere along the lines of:

1) I want everyone to be able to connect at 33.6kbit/s (standard modem speed).
2) I want to be able to support 100 concurrent users

This would, simply put, give you a 3Mb/s line.

Naturally, once you have started, you can monitor, monitor and monitor again. As a rule of thumb you should leave 25%-40% of your bandwidth to cater for unexpected peaks (e.g. promotions).

Are you sure my modems only 56kbit and not kilobytes? That would mean I can only get 7kilobytes per second yet I transfer at 10kilobytes per second in CUteftp several times.

What about a T1 is that 1.5megabits or bytes?

[inwks]

I'm prepared to stand by my guns, but I could be wrong (wouldn't be the first or last time!)...... in terms of cuteftp, I've seen many FTP clients misreport throughput. For example I'm connected to my office at 28.8kbit/s, and my ftp client reckons I've just uploaded an image to one of my sites at 4Mbit/s!

[PoolDoc]

It's entirely possible to see higher speeds listed by an FTP client, than are 'possible' with your modem or router . . . if your modem or router AND your local ISP each support some sort of compression protocol in common.

I see this all the time, when downloading uncompressed log files: I have a 128K ISDN modem with peak 'real' download rates of 15.8 KB/sec, but I routinely download pure text files, which are highly compressible, at rates of 60KB/sec. This does NOT occur when downloading files that are already compressed, such as EXE's or RPM's

This is probably a bit hard on my ISP, since during peak periods on my sites, log files exceed 100 megabytes/week, and the compression is taking place between the ISP and me, locally, but not between the ISP and my hosting service.

PoolDoc

[Rory]

Connection speeds are traditionally reported in "bits". For example, a 56K modem is actually 56,000bps (bits per second), or 56kbps (kilobits per second).

A T1 is 1.544Mbps (megabits per second).

A T3 is 45Mbps (megabits per second).

And so forth and so forth.

If you want to know the speeds of any other lines, try looking at http://www.whatis.com, I think they have most of them listed?


Regards,

Rory

[marksy]

On the original post, Dexter, you'd be far better off colocating somewhere. You simply can't provide the services you need to run a respectable web hosting business from a wireless link in your home (arguments welcome!) You'd have 0 redundancy. With colo prices so low, you can get the benefit of a full NOC until you grow to the point you can afford to build one. Check the Ded/Colo forum here for more info, personal recommendation is netinfra.com and to avoid Alabanza