Server bandwidth capacity or capability

Vibe

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Aug 3, 2005
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Hello all!

I have an existing client that has asked about hosting one of their sites that requires a higher than average amount of bandwidth per month (nothing "extreme") - roughly 10-15 GB/day or about 375 GB per month.

Our "standard" hosting plans do not accommodate for this high amount, so I suggested using a CDN (Amazon S3) for the static components of the site that utilize most of the bandwidth (MP3 & Video). This would reduce the bandwidth requirements greatly.

However, I started thinking about how much bandwidth a single DirectAdmin server could handle - and came up blank.

I realize there are a tremendous number of factors with this in mind (OS, disk performance, network cards, network connection etc.) - and we never push servers to capacity.

Does anyone have any experience (even "hypothetical") with regard to what a single DA server can handle comfortably with regard to serving content - e.g. daily bandwidth capacity?

I would enjoy hearing your thoughts - thanks!
 
The last time I tested was back in the mid 90s. In those days an i386-based linux webserver could easily saturate a T-1 line.

A T-1 line running at full capacity can move 500 GB per month.

Our current machines are much more capable than that i386-based system I tested on.

More important is how much you're paying for bandwidth. If you're paying $25 per mbps then you're paying $25 to move about 315 GB. But if you're paying $70 per mbps, then you're paying a lot more.

And don't forget to include in your figures the way your provider charges you; average, max, and 95th percentile are all quite different. On one of our connections (I just checked) our maximum was 28 mbps but our 95th percentile for the last 30 days is 3.28 mbps.

If you want to do that hosting we and others can offer you fixed 10mbps connections capable of handling up to 3 TB of data transit per month when used to full capacity.

Jeff
 
I'm running about 350GB a month on one server for a client and it's load is around .25 or less average. of course it does spike up and down during heavier times, but it's not touching the servers capabilities.

transfering large files does pretty much nothing to the server, all it does is eat up bandwidth.... so it all depends on what type of transfers this going to be? Is the content all static pages or mysql rendered pages? There is a larger picture to see then just bandwidth in order to answer this question. I could easily eat up 2000gb on this server with larger files.
 
Thank you Jeff and R1Lover for your replies - it is greatly appreciated.

Jeff - I *wish* I were paying $25/mbps! Right now we are paying $65/mbps (95th percentile) - which will go down when we add more capacity. We are doing Colo at a local data center and have chosen to pay the premium as we are only 15 minutes away. I definitely appreciate the insight behind your old i386/T1 saturation. I have little experience in this regard so that helps tremendously for my understanding. I will definitely keep in mind your suggestion as far as the connections you have available.

R1Lover - that's an excellent point. The client provided some bandwidth graphs (taken from AWStats) and it appears that roughly 180 GB/month are being used by serving one MP3 (onload player on homepage), 80 GB/month for one Flash file and roughly 40 GB for images - and the site only gets about 55,000 visits total per month. All content is static (ala "Front Page"). The server that they are on is the only one we have retained Front Page extensions functionality - so in a sense it is like their own dedicated server.

Thank you both again - definitely some very helpful information for me to digest. Best wishes to you both!
 
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