Deciated server and Bandwith

How much do you need?

[Crush]

Hi Wise ones

I am going to set up a dedicated server. We have 6000 uniques a day. Is a 1 meg line upload/download sufficient?

[pete_m]

The short answer:
It depends on your site...

The long answer:
It depends on average page weight, average number of visits per day, average number of pages per visit, whether you're hosting streaming media, the number of concurrent users (assuming you're talking about a 1Mbit/second connection), and any number of other factors.

The very short answer:
Yes. :)

[Crush]

So we have a lot of grpahics and my stats tell me at peak times we have 358 meg an hour of data transer on on site and I plan to put another site there of a similar bandwith usage. SO we could say 750 meg an hour to be on the safe side. Plus there will be people in the office surfing too.

[j4mes]

SO we could say 750 meg an hour to be on the safe side.

Which is (750/60/60)*8 = 1.67Mbit/second

Any good?

[Crush]

yes i was getting around to that. Cannot handle it that means an expensive upgrade on the line to 2 meg. Wish we lived somewhere where you can get an internet for peanuts :(

[karmov]

Don't forget your peaks... 750 Megs per hour can be evenly spaced or you could have a 10 minute burst of 690 Megs when everyone check your site at lunch time.

Traffic is most often bursty in nature and you have to know and understand the duration of those bursts and how your site will perform during those bursts. That's largely what should determine the required throughput of your connection. Cost being the other obvious component to that equation.

[JordanAutomations]

I see you're in central Europe, so this may not be relevant. I'm on the US west coast. Most of the well-connected data centers have 100mbit upload/download as standard. Some give a slight discount for 10mbit setups though. If you're talking about a line to your house/business then that would be different.

Fortunately for me there is a well-respected data center about 10 min drive from my office, so I co-locate our servers in our rack their. You might want to price out this option. Many people with a full rack in a data center will sub-rent out some of the space.

[pete_m]

There are a few things you could do to reduce your bandwidth requirements.

1 - Set content expiration on images (or on pages, if they don't need to be dynamically generated each time). The images will be cached at the browser, rather than sent down your pipe every time.

2 - If you're using Apache, set up mod_gzip to compress HTML on the fly. All modern browsers will be able to decompress the pages, and older browsers will be sent the full uncompressed HTML.

3 - Host your images on an external server, so they don't take bandwidth from your dedicated server.