The transfer bytes you can
expect to consume
If you visit a low budget ($89 to $129) dedicated server facility,
the most fascinating part of the trip may be that the disk and network lights
on most of the machines never flash.
There is a very simple reason for this. A gigabyte of bandwidth
represents 100,000 typical 10k web pages or photos. It also represents about
50,000 e-mails sent or received. Assuming an average composite page of 20k bytes,
and 60 seconds of digestion time, a gigabyte represents more than 800 viewer
hours at a web site. For many companies engaged in e-commerce, a gigabyte of
bandwidth also represents $500 to $5,000 of business generated - at the rate
of 20 to 200 page hits per dollar of revenue.
But at 10baseT speeds, one gigabyte represents only 13 minutes
of transmission time.
The simple fact of the matter is that unless you are doing an
immense amount of sales volume, or conversely "giving away" something
that a lot of people want, use of either our our remote archiving option or
remote mirrored systems (which we highly recommend for system security reasons)
will most likely burn more transfer bytes than any other process.
All bets are off if you offer
something good and "free"
There is the case of the individual who was offering
an e-book at very nominal cost (i.e. around a buck). He was getting no takers,
and was burning less than 100mb a month in bandwidth from inquirers. Out of
frustration, he decided to offer it as a free download. In the first day he
got something like 10,000 download requests for the 25mb file (250gb) -- and
was faced with a monthly bandwidth bill of $15,000. So you need to be careful
to fully understand consequences before you make major changes.
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