Computer Geeks

Soulwatcher · #1 04-19-2006, 05:58 AM

How much bandwidth is your server(s) using per month? This server uses a low amount of bandwidth. Less than 1GB per month. Last month it was above average and it used 2GB of bandwidth because of a proxy website. I honestly wonder what a server is transferring when it uses over 100GB per month.

Soulwatcher

Coop · #2 04-19-2006, 06:08 AM

My UK based cpanel server is currently running to about 42 GB/month, with a few forums hosted on it. These are all small forums though, the largest having only 3,800 members.

The US server that I share with Southernlady has used around 10 GB so far this month, but we only rented the server about 2 weeks ago. That does include uploading the sites to the server.

The main thing that hogs bandwidth is doing remote backups, or running large file / image / media download sites, legal or otherwise.

A large forum (ie. 30,000 members plus) can use a heck of a lot of bandwidth if you offer member blogs and galleries for instance.

Soulwatcher · #3 04-19-2006, 06:23 AM

Coop you bring up a good point

Quote:

The main thing that hogs bandwidth is doing remote backups

6 months from now I am going to have one of my biggest bills paid off. I am going to convert the server from a desktop to a 2u. And I am thinking about co-locating it at www.colo4dallas.com. They offer 100GB of transfer for $69.
Whats your thoughts on backing up my websites to the backup hard drive daily and downloading the databases once a week. Am I asking for trouble?

Soulwatcher

Coop · #4 04-19-2006, 07:07 AM

If you can physically get to the data center without too much trouble, then I don't see a problem. Also, if the site concerrned is not critical, and you can afford to lose a weeks worth of data, I don't see a problem. However, if your data is more important than that, then you have to assume that at some point, you are going to have a hardware failure which will prevent you from getting to your second hard drive (like the controller card failing or a processor/psu popping). If that is a nightmare scenerio, then you need to consider backing up to a remote server via SSH or similar.

Currently, with the newest server, we have decided to pay for NAS backup space ($10 for 20 MB, and available from lots of places). Once this is setup, I will be scripting a daily backup of all databases to this space. So if we had a server failure, I would just need to recover the static parts of the sites. With the static content, most people have backups of that part from when they are putting the site together, so that is usually enough for most purposes.

MMeffert · #5 04-19-2006, 07:53 AM

My site uses about 1GB of bandwidth per month for just one site. I do almost complete backups of the server daily. I have a cron that runs and backs it up and then I have a script on the workstation that downloads it the workstation every night so the backups do not take up a lot of space on the server. http://www.mitchellmeffert.com/usage/

QBall15j · #6 04-19-2006, 08:37 PM

My server uses about 10GB/month.

LucnetSolutions · #7 04-21-2006, 10:28 AM

Our servers on average use 1400 gig. We have a 2000 gig limit on our servers, I try to leave about 500 for possible surges in sites or anythings else that could take up bandwidth.

MMeffert · #8 04-22-2006, 02:37 PM

How many servers and sites do you have?

LucnetSolutions · #9 04-22-2006, 07:28 PM

Well currently we have One Shared Server, One Reseller Server, One Server for our main site LucnetSolutions.com and then we have a few we administrate.

I like to keep the Shared and Reseller Server seperate since each one has a few different settings for Reseller and Shared Accounts.

We currently have about 200 Shared Sites on the Shared Server and about the same for the Reseller Server. We are working on adding another Shared Server. Shared Plans go faster then the Reseller Plans.