Minimum expected bandwidth for a general purpose dedicated server?

dedicated server bandwidth

[caroline]

I have leased a general purpose dedicated server for hosting a low traffic dynamic website. It has a 100mbps network card.

The CPU is always less than 1%, it always has an abundance of free memory available, and network utilization is always under 1 percent utilization.

Problems:

1) Downloading a .zip file via HTTP from the server transfers at a maximum rate of 313 kbps. Downloading via FTP downloads at the same approximate rate. That is the best case scenario because by around mid-day (North America) transfer rates begin to degrade, by evening transfer rates are at about 60-80 kbps and by night 30-60 kbps. Please keep in mind that my traffic is consistently low at all hours. There is no real peak.

2) Video reproduction. In the early hours, video files on the server can be played by client browsers just fine but later in the day, video is constantly buffering. My video bitrate is 50kbps.

My dedicated server is up and running but not yet serving video. The video reproduction test above was performed by uploading a few hidden videos on the server for my testing purposes only.

I am wondering if my dedicated host provider's network is saturated. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Welcome to the forums caroline,

There are some tools you can pick up that'll track your network usage, and graph it for you. That can give an indication of whether the peak times are requiring more than 100mbps. When streaming videos it won't take many users to reach that amount.

For checking the quality of the provider's network and upstream providers, there's loads of speedtest bash scripts you can use to see what kind of throughput you can get to other servers across the world. That might help give you an indication of any problems more local to your network (if they're all slow).

[caroline]

Thank you for responding. Dedicated server to dedicated server (different companies in different locations in the U.S.) transfer speeds are extremely high, e.g. old dedicated server provider transfer to new dedicated server provider.

I just did some network bandwidth tests on my new dedicated server and they are extremely high too, e.g. 93mbps upload, 83.5mbps download. This demonstrates that my dedicated server is capable of moving huge data amounts even though my residential connection to my dedicated server bandwidth is terribly thin. The same situation occurs connecting from other residential ISPs. Yet from these residential ISPs, bandwidth to Youtube and Facebook is very high.

Hopefully someone can explain what is going on.