[lug] [OT] Bandwidth cost

[Evelyn Mitchell]

* On 2005-12-31 06:34 Daniel Webb <lists at danielwebb.us> wrote:
> I'm putting together a business plan, but one of the things I'm having a hard
> time estimating is bandwidth cost.  For a business with high bandwidth use
> (>500GB/month) how do you calculate this?  Something tells me providers won't
> be happy about a business that saturates a "business" 1.5 Mbit DSL 24/7 when
> it only costs $90/month or whatever, since that's over 300GB.  So as a
> hypothetical, what kind of connection are you forced to buy at 500, 1000, 5000
> GB/month transfer?

If you're looking at that much traffic, and you know what your usage
patterns are (clustered in a few days of the month, or pretty constant over
the whole time or something in between), then you should be able to get
quotes from providers.

Providers are happy to sell you bandwidth that will fit your needs. 

If you have bursty bandwidth needs, DSL won't work, because the pipe
won't be big enough to handle the spike capacity. The usage pattern will
tell you how big a pipe you'll need to buy. 

And, don't forget latency to your users. You can often test whether or not
a connection has good routing to the places you want to get to before
signing on.

I'd be happy to talk with you more about this in email, if you'd like.

Evelyn
> 
> I have seen $2/GB on the low end for web hosting providers (what they charge
> to website owners for transfer).  Is it really this expensive?
> 
> Sort of off-topic, but the business would be Linux-based, so...
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Evelyn Mitchell             Linux Consulting since 1995
efm at tummy.com               Senior System and Network Administrators
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