When I moved R3 Network to SoftLayer, we received 2000GB bandwidth allocation each server. We don’t use much of our public bandwidth on MySQL server as we connect to it using internal private IP, however I can’t say the same for our web server.
Based on last month usage (May), our web server has used up 1694.14GB of bandwidth. I never thought running seven blog sites would consume so much bandwidth. SlashGear.com alone uses average of 880GB of bandwidth monthly.
We reach around 1.6 million unique visitors monthly and that’s an increase of 45% from last year for the same month. Bandwidth usage from May last year was only 220GB that means the 45% visitor increase in traffic resulted in 770% in bandwidth usage increase (hope my math is right).
2000GB bandwidth/month used to mean a lot to me, but after seeing the usage number for this May, it looks fairly little. . Soon it will be time to get unmetered bandwidth servers, but I hate moving sites to different servers – it takes time to reconfigure the server the way I want it. I might look into moving our static files to Amazon S3 like we did with our videos.
Bill Sehmel Says:
I would look into our virtual dedicated rack for advanced graphing capabilities and bandwidth pooling purposes. It’s $25.00 a month per server and you can take your total number of servers in the pool and have the bandwidth as one under the account, so if you have say 2 web servers 1 that uses 1600GB, 1 that uses 1000GB, and a db server that uses 2gb.
You would have a total of 6000gigs in your pool, and not have to worry if web1 that uses around 1600 – 2000 gigs as it can use the bandwidth from the other two servers that aren’t using it.
Bill Sehmel
SoftLayer.com Customer Systems Administrator
Posted on June 5th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Ewdison Then Says:
Thanks Bill. I will definitely look into private rack. You guys at SoftLayer really know how to push the hosting technology with a big leap and put the word “customer service” into a whole different game.
Posted on June 5th, 2008 at 11:53 pm