[P1] Bandwidth

[Life Long Learner]

on 3/13/03 12:11 PM, Rick Banuelos at teasethedog at mac.com wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone can help a novice, here....
> 
> I am building a website for my upcoming film. I'm going to have clips
> of the film available for download- 3 one to two minute clips, and a
> one-minute trailer. I'm planning on having the clips in quicktime, and
> somewhat highly compressed. I'm pretty familiar with how much online
> storage space I'll need, but I don't know how much bandwidth to buy for
> something like this. Any suggestions?

I've been in the web hosting business for 3 years and managing web servers
for more than 6 years, and I find my best resources are other folks like me.
The best place for this is the webhosting forum: <www.webhostingtalk.com>.

There are many affordable hosting plans on the web, and believe me, they are
much more efficient and cost effective than trying to do this from home on a
broadband connection. There's a lot of confusion about what it means to have
a broadband connection, but trust me, it's not suitable for serving unless
you have a very specialized connection. There are some sdsl setups that
would be okay for your purposes. But in general, cable and dsl connections
do not sustain a consistent enough uplink to provide the kinds of services
you are talking about. Plus, when dsl and cable connections begin to fill,
latency is introduced that all but ruins the client's experience with web
page access.

I'm setting up a T-1 to my home and I still won't try to handle any serious
server duties from my home. I want it primarily for upload bandwidth to my
servers and for distributed backup services.

A reputable host provider will have a 10mb/s port directly to a tier-1
bandwidth provider, and so you would be able to handle hundreds of GB/month
in transfers if you were running a couple dozen simultaneous connections
24/7. Look for one who has a nominal startup cost and is able to handle
scaling up your bandwidth needs should that become necessary.

Best regards,
Jeffrey