DSL connection for Web Server

How fast is enough?

[engasi]

Hi All,

Our company has T1. But we want to have a seperate DSL connection dedicated to web server. Our web site is not that a heavy traffic site. My question is how fast is good enough for the website? 768kbs upload/1mbs download is enough?

Thanks.

[korkus2000]

Depends on the traffic. I would be more concerned with up time. DSL, atleast here, can go down for a while. I would want to make sure that it is always connected.

[txbakers]

Yes, 768 upload is plenty good for a basic webserver, even dial-up browsers can access the site well.

[DavidP]

Wellll ... I once ran 3 major sites over a 128K ISDN line. Oddly enough performance wasn't too bad a lot of the time.

What it comes down to really is capacity planning. What sort of usage patterns are you expecting, how many simultaneous users, how large is each page, how long will they spend on each page, do you have large downloadable files, how much bandwidth are you likely to chew up, etc.

[davemarks]

If it hopes for a rough guide, we own a server that chews about 80GB a month. We pay for a 2mb/sec connection. This is worked out as 95percentile though.

Anyway we never use anywhere near that. We have several hundred sites on this server and a good few that are very popular...

[jpjones]

I share Korkus2000's concerns.

DSL does not come with a service guarantee (at least, not as far as I've seen). It can, or more likely WILL have uptime problems, which means your server will drop off of the internet for a while. Is this a problem? If so, consider hosting elsewhere or at least have a backup solution in place!

As for upload speed, 768k should be fine for a light-to-moderate loaded server hosting only web pages, text, and a moderate amount of images (this includes dynamic content). I'd make sure the webserver supports compression as this will increase the serving capacity over the line.
You'll probably find serving video or any similar bandwidth-consuming tasks involving more than 2 users a no no.

JP