Forum Moderators: phranque
My sites serve 5,000mbits per day. How would I go about calculating if this is too much for a 1.5mbs connection?
Yes, i have backup power and temp controls - just bandwidth question for now....
thks
If you have 1.5mbits, and I download a page, I'm getting it at 1.5mbits from you. If two people download a page, we're getting download speeds of 1/2 of 1.5mbits each. The total flow is cut in half for each of us. So how your traffic is spread out is important as well.
What you really need to do is look at your traffic from your current hosting company. Your hosting company should be able to provide a report like that - one that will let you see where your peaks are and how much bandwidth you use during those peaks. If your peaks are all below 1.5mbits, then you're likely fine self hosting. Worst case, at peak times things slow down a bit as more and more people share the line.
My gut check also suggests you're likely fine. It takes quite a bit of traffic to saturate a 1.5mbit connection. Not that long ago a 1.5mbit connection was pretty hot stuff. Last time I checked a couple of years ago I could put all my stuff on a 1.5mbit connection easily, as can most people.
however, I've done both. I brought in my own fibre line at one point so I could self host (I prefer as much control as I can). And my experience says you are way, way better off colocating. There is so much more work and expense doing this yourself that it's almost crazy not to spend the 50 or 200 bucks a month letting the pros handle it. backup power, maybe, but probably not as good as at a data center. No support should things go wrong or you get a flood of traffic. Someone attacks your site, you've got big problems. Get busy, same problems. I assume you don't have multiple redundant connections to the internet either, so one drunk Homer on a backhoe puts you out of business for three days.
And there are other things that affect speed - like peer sharing and distance (I've been through all this :) ). A 1.5 mbit connection locally won't be anywhere near the quality you'll get at most datacenters. For example when I self hosted, it was something like 40mseconds just to get from me, through the provider, out to anyone in a large metropolitan center. Then from there it was however long to the client. At my datacenter I'm now in, my colo company has peer sharing arrangements with all of the big internet providers. So my pages leave my server, hop the metal cage to the next floor in the datacenter and are immediately on the network of 95% of people in my country - that's peer sharing. And there's fibre coming out of the building in 30 different directions, taking my webpages immediately across the country and to other peer sharing arrangements around the world. Meanwhile your traffic is playing that merry go round music :).
That's a bit of an essay and these things seem small. But I've done both self hosting and colocating and all these small things become much more important once you're doing it. You will almost certainly find that self hosting is a LOT more work, a LOT more money than you think, and you'll get a bit lower quality.
Find yourself a good colo. Stick to doing what you know how to do - running your website. Let the people who run the internet tubes stick to running the internet tubes.
