Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : bandwidth question, confused!

[surfmanjoe]

Regarding bandwidth caculation, there are two regular options:
1£¬unlimited monthly bandwidth with burstable to 10M/S.
2, capped bandwidth with 1M/S
Based on same fee, same hardwares and systems with same application, which one is better? I mean faster to clients?

Option 1 does NOT reveal speed of bandwidth although it could be 10M/s at maximum speed. It(10M/s) seems by far faster than option 2(1M/s). right?

My question is, is really option 2 slower than option 1? in general, option 2 is more expensive than option 1, how come? or I don't have correct idea on that?

Anyone could detail on that? thank you very much.

[NeedServer]

burstable is always faster

[Tazzman]

1 x 1 = 1
1x 10 = 10

I think the math should be obvious...

the 10 MBIT is 10 times 'faster' than te 1 MBIT, but the question is how many people are sharing the 10 MBIT. If 20 people are on the same 10 MBIT, you basicly are only guarenteed an avarage of 0.5 MBIT, but it's unlikely those 20 people are going to burst to the 10 MBIT at the same time...

[nik martin]

capped bw is good for fixed budgets, it gurantees a max cost per month, but the performance drops drastically as connections rise. Burstable means different stuff to different people I'm now learning, but a lot depends on the billing of that 10m/s connection, one being 95%. Some burstable plans are just that, You can burst at 10m/s, but individual connections will degrade based on time, so 1 connection won't consistently get over 64kbps after a few seconds. This covers you host if youre serving mp3's. etc., but gives good speed on regular html type traffic.

[silversurfer]

No hard and fast rule once again ...

Your two options are better rephrased as:

1. 10mbit/s unlimited traffic
2. 1mbit/s unlimited traffic

So... once you look at it from this perspective it's pretty clear since 10mbit/s > 1mbit/s.

To decide on which one, you will have to look at your usage patterns and obviously cost. I would expect option 1 to cost more than option 2 . Burstable is useful if you foresee your peak usage to exceed a certain amount. For example, if you know that you may not use much bandwidth usually, but at your peak times can hit as much as 5-10mb/s, obvioulsy have burstable bandwidth will help towards that cause.

However if you never hit 1mbit/s even at peak usage, then taking the cost factor, you may want to save on cost and take the 1mbit/s.