Biggest Single Expense

[ccd1]

Bandwidth seems to be the biggest single expense in hosting a website. Building the server itself is rather cheap, maybe a couple thousand dollars but buying the bandwidth can be twice of that per month!

How do so many people end up hosting their own websites? You can't do it off DSL or Cable internet because they're asynchronous, and even T1 costs around $800 and is slower (Downloadwise) than DSL or Cable.

[eva2000]

they either

work and fork out the money from their own pocket
and/or
have sponsors/advertisers
and/or
use affiliate programs
and/or
partner with someone else to share the costs

[ccd1]

Is there any general rule of thumb to know how much bandwidth you need?

For instance, how many kbps do you need per 100 simutaneous users at a time (assuming some are reading and typing and not all loading pages at the same time--like it would be realistically).

[eva2000]

total depends on the site

total bandwidth per month = (average size of a vB page + graphics) x (visitors per month) x (pageviews per visitor) + (average attachment size x average times each attachment is viewed) + (how many emails per month you send/receive through vB and pop3 a/cs x average email size)

then add 25 - 50% on top of that for a guestimate

[ccd1]

But what about at a time? I mean, that formula works for the bandwidth you'll accumulate in a month. But how much will I be using at a peak time? If I had a maximum of 100 users at one point in the day, how much bandwidth would I need (like a 100, 250, 500 kbps)?

I can't necesarrily divide the bandwidth I get all month by the number of seconds in a month because at some points, you can have zero users and at others 100 users.

How much bandwidth should each user get? 4 kpbs? 10 kbps?

[Raz Meister]

Each user should get as fast as their connection goes - which nowadays tends to be 512kbps+

If you want to give all 100 users at the same time then multiply that by 100.

A good T3 would probably keep your users happy. Which is why most people don't host it on their own connection but pay a hosting company to do it for them.

[ccd1]

But wouldn't 512 kbps (64 KB/s) be a waste for webpages that are around 20 KB? They all won't be using the bandwidth at the exact same time (they'll be reading a page or writing a post).

I mean, if there are ten users on a board.

4 are reading a post. 5 are writing a post. And only one is clicking through to another page. This sounds pretty reasonable considering only 1% of your time is spent on waiting for the page to load--while the rest is on reading and writing and other idle time.

With a 128kbps DSL uplink, you can probably host 5-10 users at a time (I've done it before and had no complaints or problems with speed of the site--it was purely HTML and images of course)

[LanciaStratos]

I host my site on a dedicated server at RackShack.net (http://www.rackshack.net/), and I can confidently say that they have saved me thousands of dollars on bandwidth expenses ($99/month for 400 GB, including server! :eek: ). If it will help you out any, here are my traffic/bandwidth statistics (combined from GTPlanet.net and Forums.GTPlanet.net):

Page Views: 20,000 - 25,000 per day
Users Online: consistantly 20-60 users online (forums only)
Monthly Bandwidth Average: 574.8 kb/s out, 44.1 kb/s in