I've been looking at managed hosting deals but I need to educate myself first (it seems). For some projects we use shared hosting plans where we get 5Gb transer bandwidth a month. We have a bunch of those. Now this company quotes me a deal based on a HP DL140 Redhat Linux Server and it comes with '1Mb Transit Bandwidth'. Can you please tell me how '1Mb Transit Bandwidth' compares with N x 5Gbyte transfer bandwith? I thought I knew most geek speak but this sales guy is making me look dumb.
I think the sales guy's random buzz word generator needs tweaking. Transit bandwidth is between peer ISPs, telco carriers or physical datacenters i.e., where they interconnect to pass traffic from one network to another. He may be talking about their connections to the NAPs / peering points but it sounds like a load of manure to me.
OK that makes me look better thanks . His 1Mb can only translate into 1 MegaByte I thought so I was wondering why he would be mentioning 1Mb transfer limits. Even if he's talking Server to backbone, 1Mb isn't that impressive is it? We're on a 3 MegaByte internet line, I'd expect a dedicated server to have a wider pipe than that. I'll keep bugging him with questions and then ask a competitor
If he's offering what I think he is, (bandwidth, not data transfer) this might help. According to this, it's about 8.6 GB data transfer/day. As for if the pipe is fast enough during peak times, that you would have to judge for yourself. http://www.howtocorp.com/cgi-bin/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/3856
If they limit it at 1 Mbps, the maximum speed will be about 100 KBps. An average DSL line is capable of pumping about 120 KBps. Several visitors downloading your content will experience slowdowns. If this hosting company just samples every 5 minutes and then at the end of the month divide overall data transfer by the number of days to calculate the average bandwidth, but the actual connection is capable of a greater speed (say, 10 Mbps), this would offer better experience for your visitors. J.D.
This is what I had in mind it will load at the early stages: 6000 unique visitors per day (over several domains) who browse 5 pages on average which are 75 KiloByte on average each. That's 2.250.000 KB. Or 2.250 MB or 2,25 GB a day, correct? All domains will have their peaks at the same time though this will probably see 70% of the requests in 20% of the day. Not exactly rush-hour per se. However, the figures above will have to be able to double within 6 months. And server responsiveness should be the same (noticably) after the 100% growth. Based on those traffic stats is this a hardware set-up that is suitable? Redhat Linux on a HP Proliant DL140 Xeon DP 3060 GHz (533MHZ FSB on 512 cache (1MB opt)) 80GB ATA-100 Integrated controller 1024 MB DDR 2100 1U 2 * 10/100/1000 HP NIC 1Mb Transit Bandwidth This is a top class host who's nearest to the top of the hierarchy you can possibly get. Not a re-re-reseller far down the tree. It's Managed Hosting so they do all the work and maintenance, we rent the server. The price is way more than I expected (what would you expect to pay for this?) but if the speed is significantly better over the current shared host deals it might be worth it (plus central maintenance/administration and more benefits).
I'd expect a dual 3 GHz Xeon, SATA/SCSI dedicated self-managed server (with free support) with about 1000-2000 GB/mo go for about $300-$400 US/mo. I have no idea how much a managed server would cost nowadays, but I remember contacting Verio a couple of years ago about this and the cost they quoted was astronomical. Hopefully, prices have gone down since then. J.D.
What I outlined above works out at about $600 a month. But it's loads more than the shared hosting and I haven't been convinced of the supposedly significant improvements which there must be though. Plenty of time to suss it out though...
TOPS, I think it is going to be hard to say, "yeah, that will be fine" when nobody knows what you will be serving. If you are just serving static HTML pages with no includes, no php, no cgi then yeah that will probably be enough (I would see if you can get the 1MB L2 cache thrown in there). We are a gold level reseller at Verio, not that we resell anything, just use a lot of servers...I can check on this later today as my partner handles all of that. The one thing I have found with ISPs like this is that you get what you pay for. Verio is more expensive, but their boxes work. And, if something happens it usually corrects itself in less than a minute and if not you can get someone on the phone.
Yeah it's PHP/MySQL with a dozen SQL queries each page (some form of caching but not much). At the moment, on the shared host it's OK though seems slow-ish at times. Haven't been amazed by its speeds. By having basically my private CPU and box, can I expect a distinctively noticable speed increase or is the main benefit in reliablility, service, expandability, sheer size etc.?
Again it is really impossible to say yes or no without knowing your situation. If you are on a shared machine, how beefy is it? How many hosts are on there with you? What kind of resources do they use/have access to? Blah, blah, blah.
Those questions are exactly what I asked them today but they seem to think 48 hours is OK for replying to customers. (At least their tech support is a lot faster compared to their slow sales people.)
1mb of transit, your server will get a 10mb/s or 100mb/s connection and you will be able to use 1mb/s on average. It will be calculated using either average or 95%ile billing. 95%ile is the following Your host will take a speed sample of your server every 5 minutes, at the end of the month those samples are put in order from lowest to highest, then the highest 5% of the samples are deleted and the remaining highest sample is your 95%ile speed for that month. Average billing is just that, a sample is taken every 5 minutes and at the end of the month the average speed is is calculated. 1mb/s is roughtly 300GB of datatransfer per month in one direction. or 600GB in both directions. Thats provided you fully utilise the 1mb/s 24/7.
Great stuff mkeen, I already know a lot more now thanks to you people. Makes it a bit easier to suss out these sales people and negotiate it down. Also for comparison. Is the 95%ile just a statistic or are yuo actually talking billing here? I was quoted a yearly fee so I guess it's fixed regardless of wheather we actually use it up or not.
here is my transit log for a few of my servers http://img47.echo.cx/my.php?image=transit1hh.jpg as you can see the 95%ile is calculated.
The support at Verio is good, but you don't necessarily get a good deal setup-wise. I was hosting at Verio at one point and the way account was setup, it wasn't very secure or convenient to use. I had similar experience with other big-name companies. The only thing they guarantee is that if something go wrong, somebody will listen to you and you may get a refund. J.D.
No the graphs are reversed because its querying the router. Traffic in is actually traffic leaving my switch and traffic out is coming into the router.