My Site Uses Too Much Bandwidth

What are the best solutions?

[robsterooni]

Hi,

I am hosting a 1GB web site (all of the heavy content is quicktime movies) on my dedicated server. Since launching the website 20 days ago 200GB of my 512GB limit has been eaten by eager web surfers! Guess I screwed that one up, eh? When I go over my limit I get charged £1 per GB.

Rather than pay another £3000-ish a year for the extra bandwidth I considered buying "normal" web space (at £586 a year for 10GB web space and 250GB a month bandwidth). Then I could keep my movies (which constitue 95% of the data) on this site and link to them from my dedicated server's site. Does this make sense or am I talking nonsense? Would it work?

Hope you can help, otherwise I'm screwed! :)

[AmericanBulldog]

I would look at leasing your own server, there are many deals out there with 700-1000 Gig of transfer for under $200 USD/mth on fast machines. You may also need someone to set up and secure the server for you, but it will still be much cheaper.

[danieljean]

I'll second AmericanBulldog on his recommendations.

You might also consider using smaller file sizes, or if you have a technically savvy userbase and aren't selling access to the files, you could try something like Bittorrent for distribution.

Either way I would not be paying those types of fees for bandwidth!

[jmbishop]

I have a client that had some Quicktime movies of his seminars up on his site that were about 7mb each... In one month he used 30GB.

So we converted them to Macromedia Flash movies and this lowered their size to around 4.2mb each...

Not a huge difference but when you multiply it out it dropped his bandwidth to around 19GB.

Jerrod

[robsterooni]

Hi, thanks for your replies. I have been shopping around and have not really found a cheaper alternative (for a dedicated server, that it). My client wants quicktimes rather than any other format so that's that out of the window :-(

I am currently in negotiation with my server provider for a 3 terabyte per year deal that I hope will come in at considerably less than £3000 a year.

Also, I am looking into bandwidth limiting software for the webserver. I currently have mod_bwshare (the only bandwidth limiting module for Apache 2 I could find) but it does not provide enough control for my needs. I am currently looking into writing my own module to control the download rate of movies.

If you have any other suggestions I'd appreciate your help.

And thanks a lot for your time! :-)

Rob

[Leosghost]

Your hoster needs to join the real world with their prices ...!Shop around ..

[amznVibe]

If you cut your video dimensions in half, the encoding should be around one fourth the size. If you absolutely must serve video, that may be your only option.

Otherwise consider distributed downloading such as
[bitconjurer.org...]

[robsterooni]

Can't cut the video in half. We do have a half-res option on the site for each movie, but visual effects is the business and the movies must unfortunately remain largish. :-(

Can't use BitTorrent either - the clients are very far from tech savvy! It's amazing they manage to get to the web site at all.

[danieljean]

As has been said, shop around; those rates are outrageous.

If you do not sell the files, they don't have to be on the same server as your content pages. How about renting another server dedicated solely to serving big files?

[pete_m]

robsterooni: Get hosting in the US - bandwidth charges are a fraction of what they are in the UK. Keep all your code, db and images on your dedicated server, and offload your movies onto that US host.

[drbrain]

Depending on your OS, you may be able to perform bandwidth limiting at the OS level.

[robsterooni]

Hi,

Have negotiated a really good deal with my current provider which brings the whole 3TB a year dedicated server deal to around £1200 a year. Maybe there are better deals in the US but my client is very happy with that price and it makes everything a lot easier for me.

Bandwidth limiting at the OS level : I am using Redhat linux 8, is this possible? Can I limit the bandwidth just on port 80?

Thanks guys! :-)

[Matt Probert]

Glad you're happy.

However, as another UK based web business I should echo the sentiment that UK bandwidth charges are very high. I recommend looking at North American hosts, we get 500gB a month transfer for $99 US (about £58 currently) a month with our dedicated server.

Matt

[Leosghost]

, we get 500gB a month transfer for $99 US

That is expensive for a dedicated server in the USA....you should be getting at least double that bandwidth with a standard config ..

example
P 2.4 ( more or less )
512mb or 1 gig ram
around 80 gigs HD ( sometimes two 80 gig discs ) ...
without going into all the details of what else should be on offer for $99 ..you need to look further ..
can get this for $50 and up ...less HD space even cheaper ...

I think you must be dealing with a reseller ...