Bandwidth advice please

[Mark Keane]

Hello guys,

I would appreciate some advice from your extensive webmaster experience as to which companies I should approach for website hosting. I have read many of your educational postings on the subject but my needs are slightly unusual. I need to set-up a website as part of a promotion for a DVD launch but I expect a vast number of hits (millions) in a short amount of time followed by a massive levelling off levelling. The site will only be small, less than 20 megs. It will be quite tame, stills and graphics just topless but it would be nice to have some full nudity in the downloadable trailers. If it makes a difference maybe I could host the nude trailers on another site. I would like to find a company (like BT) that could handle the traffic without crashing or slowing down to a snails pace but don?t want to to be crucified financially, one that allows nudity (I know he wants his cake as well as eating it) Your words of wisdom and experiences (ideally with advice on costs) would be very welcome. Mark@theladsguide.com

[Shaun]

I only have a limited experience in this area but I do know that the bulk of cost with hosting is on bandwidth rather than space. 20 megs isn't a great deal. If you are hosting clips then you can expect that the very least a clip will be is around 500 Kb. A normal webpage is around 50 - 100Kb.

Space aside (the space is the cheap bit) you will need a lot of bandwidth if you are expecting 'millions' of hits. Each of those hits will be downloading the initial webpage (say 100kb). 1,000,000(hits) x 100,000(bytes) = 100,000,000,000 (bytes of bandwidth) or 100,000 Mb's or 100 Gb's.

If all those people decide to download a couple of clips / trailers as well then you are probably talking serious money to host that.

10 Gb's is (this is a rough / average type figure) around ?200 per year. So 100 Gb's would be around ?2000 a year (this is a complete estimate so don't take these figures as fact).

If it is going to be an initial surge and then level off, you could probably say that you would be paying around ?166 per month (2000 / 12) but remember that the bandwidth proposed here is very conservative. I have only calculated for 1 million people (not 'millions') and also if they just download the initial webpage.

You at least get an idea of how much this is going to cost. If you are sure of the number of visitors then make sure the webpage pays for itself by getting advertising and referrals in place before the big surge. That way you should make enough through the site to at least pay for itself (or, at the very worst, offset some of the cost)

Good luck...

Shaun )

[Matt - A-W-D]

Don't host in the UK. Bandwith is way cheaper and more abundant in the US and with the weak Dollar, theres never been a better time to purchase goods/services for years!

[Mark Keane]

Thanks Shaun,

You idea for advertising or referrals is a good one. The last time I set-up a website was seven years ago. Are there any agencies that you know of that I can contact or is it a case of dealing with individual companies ?

[Mark Keane]

Thanks Matt,

I hear what your saying but I don't know how to find out which US hosting companies are any good. Can you recommend any ?

[Mark Keane]

I hear the advice on using US hosting companies but I also read though BT's terms and conditions and they don't seem to charge by bandwidth just on storage does anyone know if this is the case? They also state that as long as anything that would "offend", particularly minors must be proceeded by a warning page, apart from that anything legal in the UK goes. Thoughts anyone ?