"unlimited bandwidth" at Verio

VPS on Verio - should I worry?

[favedave]

I have a new website on a Virtual Private Server plan at Verio and when I signed up the phrase was "unlimited bandwidth", which is important to me because I need to show video clips.

Well, the site just started, we have barely hit the search engines and I'm getting 1 gig worth of transfers a day!

The clips are funny, so people are linking. The first day we got 75 visitors from a university Taiwain of all places. (It's not adult content BTW).

I just noticed that Verio now sells the plan with "no bandwidth charges!" instead of the "unlimited" adjective of before.

We're getting ready to appear on some national talk shows, so people are going to be watching these clips like crazy - tech support at Verio (always helpful) say not to worry.

Should I worry? and what's the backup plan? Should I get another plan at another company (reliable one) that gives 60 gigs transfer and have it waiting to switch the clips to?

Thoughts?

I'm new to this.

if you want the url to the clips, just message me.
thanks.

[Travoli]

If you are going to be on National TV, it might be a good idea to get a co-located setup. The last thing you would want is to not be able to serve your site on it's biggest day.

[Maxformed]

Travoli has a good point, for the co-location. I've used Verio for the past few years and don't have any real complaints - but the VPS will start showing maxclients in your error log file when the bandwidth hits take off.

Congratulations on your success.
Max

[johannes]

You should check with Verio what the max number of Apache processes is. You can configure this in httpd.conf, but there should be a hard limit too since it's a vps.

I don't trust "unlimited bandwidth", there's probably another bottleneck.

[bunltd]

favedave, Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

We use Verio VPS for some of our hosting. Is it a newer VPS2 or the older version?

The new VPS2's have a much higher allowance for processes, etc. Per Verio: VPS2Pro there is no max apache processes, apache processes are limited by the amount of total processes which is in the neighborhood of about 150. The Pro Plus which has about 375 (total processes). (quite an improvement over the previous/older VPS)

Hope that helps. Watch your logs, they'll tell you what you need to know.

LisaB

[favedave]

"We use Verio VPS for some of our hosting. Is it a newer VPS2 or the older version? "

It's the VPS 2.

I just got off the phone with tech support and he doesn't know the limit either! He said no one in his office does.

He said if it gets really high, it will slow down the server but not stop access. That's good news. Then he said I'd be contacted to let me know, and I could upgrade to handle the extra need. But the colocation and dedicated servers at Verio are way too expensive.

So I will plan ahead by doing this: getting a high bandwidth account at somewhere like pair networks and just put the movie clips there when we have a national tv appearance coming up.

THe stats scare me - a gig a day with only 300 visitors.

Can anyone recommend another good high bandwidth provider? I'm also toying with the idea of hosting it myself from my home but I'm having trouble figuring out how much that would cost...

[TGecho]

>> I'm also toying with the idea of hosting it myself from my home but I'm having trouble figuring out how much that would cost... <<
I don't think your local ISP would appreciate that... :)

[airpal]

Beware, unlimited bandwidth is the biggest myth of all hosting companies! I used to be a reseller of Verio services about 2 years ago, and after using a large amount of their bandwidth on their "unlimited" plans they simply said pay up for your extra bandwidth or we'll shut down your servers. Luckily enough, we got out of there and after growing a lot, finally own all our servers and buy bandwidth directly from the carrier. So, I can tell you from experience, that anybody that offers unlimited bandwidth = TROUBLE!

I run a hosting company myself, and will tell you that when the big news release comes, you better be prepared, because your traffic surge will be enormous. That's why our lowest server spec is a P4 2.8GHZ w/ 1GB DDR! Another hosting company that I know was hosting the infamous iraqi minister site on one of their servers, and that server went down within minutes because of the huge surge of requests. A regular one-processor dedicated server is usually not enough to handle a huge traffic surge. It is best to have either a dual processor/scsi hard drive (for the movie files) server or a load-balancing solution. If you have any more questions, please feel free to sticky me (that doesn't sound right).

P.S. Tgecho is right, your ISP will usually act quickly to shut down your webserver. Besides, 300GB/month is 1mbit outgoing, which is not easy to achieve, even with residential broadband connections.