Bandwidth concenrs

shared or dedicated severs?

[hdpt00]

I am starting to consolidate all my mini sites into a big site and imagine I will be getting about 20,000 unique visitors per day and about 70,000 page views. I guesstimate this will be roughly 2GB transfer per day.

What type of solutions should I look into in order to minimize my bandwidth cost. Should I go to a dedicated server? This will be about 60GB transfer a month. I see some shared hosts that say they can handle this, but can they really?

I want to keep hosting as low as possible to keep my margins up. Any help or what to look forward to, please let me know.

Thanks!

[sublime1]

Here are a couple of thoughts that may or may not address your question.

1) A shared hosting solution is likely to be cheaper since you can buy your bandwidth at a volume discount. If you are hosting in co-location center, you typically buy an amount of committed bandwidth at a discount and pay a higher fee depending on how many times bandwidth "bursts" over that amount. Any reasonable hosting facility can handle 2GB per day. Remember, you buy bandwith in megabits per second (mbps), not bytes, so 2 gigabytes in a day is 2,000,000,000 * 8 /(60 * 60 * 24) or a little less than 1 mbps. My current company now has 20mbps committed; my last company, a major search engine (at the time) was doing more than 100mbps.

2) Specify ExpiresByType directive for images, scripts and CSS (and anything else that doesn't change frequently) and set to a day or more. This will speed up repeat pageviews for your users.

3) Put your pages on a diet with CSS. With a concerted effort, we moved to CSS and reduced the raw size of all of our pages by about 50% using CSS. Again, also good for users.

4) Ban bots and viruses. Our sites get hit by bad bots every day and generate some pretty amazing number of hits that do us no good, and when they put enough load on the system can make things slow for other users.

Hope this helps.