Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : how much bandwidth do you need?

[salty dog]

just wanted to see what everyone opinion is for this.

Web site directed at all military past or present.

this web site will be for viewing, posting and filling out surveys. web site will be desigend to use the lowest amount of bandwidth as possible. so if you have 50,000 people online doing those things how much bandwidth do you think you would need?

[Ultima VPS]

Most people grossly overestimate their bandwidth usage. You can probably safely say it will be under 50GB a month. Unless your site is doing 50,000 unique hits a day then you will need around 200GB a month.

[Fizzadar]

It's extremely difficult to predict. However, a site of that nature is more likely to have issues with CPU/RAM before it's bandwidth starts getting high. 50k users is a lot, no matter how "bandwidth optimized" it is.

[bqinternet]

Unless your site is hosting videos or large images, your usage should be small, even for a large amount of visitors. If you have 50,000 visitors, and your average visitor is pulling down about 200KB of content, then you would be using 10GB of data transfer.

[tariqj]

correct me if im wrong, but if the same user comes back the next day, most of the images, etc. will be stored in their cache/temporary internet files (assuming they didn't manually clear them)
so, you have to determine what percentage of that 50000 are repeat visitors (which is what makes it so hard to predict)

[jon-f]

there are so many variables in play for that. just depends on type of site, files offered, etc. I have seen accounts with 500 unique visitors a day use 200 gb in a month and then Ive seen some with 10k+ unique visitors a day use less then 50 gb in a month.

As far as having a site with 50k people online at one time. I think unless you are buying some super high traffic domain or gonna launch a huge ad campaign for an appealing site then you may wanna look at things more realistically.

Any site with that much traffic you are looking at dedicated pipes, clusters, etc. Gonna be a mighty hefty chunk of change.