Someone will respond with numbers...I'll pose a few thoughts for you to use when modifying their numbers
Like memory, hard drive space, coding time, etc, your bandwidth needs will growth to fill your available bandwidth, plan accordingly and either buy more than you think you need now and in the short term future, or make sure you have the technical ability to upgrade to higher kbs. Either way...your coworkers don't know or care about speed, capacity, etc. If you hand them a T1 line that is only at 1/2 capacity utilization, and they have cd burners or are bored, you can bet they will download mp3s to burn, or stream music directly. See if you can find server logs for your website and run them through a program like Webtrends (available for a 2 week free trial) or another log file analysis program. They will show you spikes for max throughput, daily throughput, etc. Make a few wild ass guesses for your calculations. Pick some arbitrary number/percentage for the hours that no one really uses your site versus uses it mildly versus peak times. You can't just multiply kbs * 24 hours * 30 days = 12gb...because, think about it, who really uses your site at 3am? Foreigners, a few night owls maybe? But not the majority of clients. Likewise, you will have email spikes when you come into the office in the morning and again after lunch, IF your system doesn't use its own email servers and you use POP3 clients like Outlook to connect offsite to mailboxes. So, depending on how you check email, you may have straight usage based on when it is sent to you (still probably during the daytime) or it may have all of the nightly bandwidth saved up until 8am when everyone opens their email programs and hits 'update'. So, when do your customers use the capacity? When do you use it? You may find that of the 12gb/month, 10gb may run through your systems in say, a 10 hour day 5 days a week. So really, your other 14 hours per day and weekends may have minimal usage needs, but then you are spreading the 10gb over 50 hours versus 12gb over 168 hours. Also, consider cost versus you and your client's willingness to sit and stew. If you have the ability to portion off bandwidth, you might want to say, give a set amount to the webserver no matter what, both in and out. You don't want to allow anything to take 100% unless there is a need. What happens if employees decide to ftp their entire Win98 or music cds to a friend, and someone needs to hit your webserver. All of a sudden, 100% of your outbound capacity is being hogged by an employee (for worthless reasons possibly) and the webserver has to fight for capacity. Ryan ---------- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 21:43:01 -0400 From: "Duane Boudreau" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Bandwidth Calculations Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'm looking into new colo digs and I need to determine how many kbs I need to plan for. Does anyone here know how x number of mg or gb translates in to xkb per sec? As a company we transfer approx 12GB of data per month between web and email traffic. How do I convert that into kbs? Thanks Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
