

Question/Opinion: Proper Bandwidth For Startups - PrestoManifesto

Hello Admins/Engineers<p>I've asked this question outside of the online
environment and the answers have ranged wildly. I'm
currently hosting an database &#38; web server with a
Dedicated Business Connection from Comcast at 16mb
Down and 2mb Up (Runs about $110 a month). It's the
most available in my area. How many requests can that
handle? And if things were to grow from 100
hits/searches an hour to 1000, then 10,000 what would
be required? I'm asking because it's important we
keep this hardware in house. Currently the site sends
between 45k-110k per request. Hopefully this can be a
reference point for other who may have this question.
======
jjoe
It really depends on what app you're running. Let's look at this from the
point of view of the user of your app.

Your user sees a 2Mbps (assuming you meant Mbps not MB/s) connection. That's a
very narrow band for a Web server. Typically, Web servers push much more data
to the users than they receive (GET vs POST ratio). The 16Mbps upload (again
from the users' pov) matters little unless your users upload much more than
they download from your app.

Think of it this way: most content from your Web server is served out to your
users using the 2Mbps (GET). This is why cable/DSL is not well suited for
running Web servers. But if you still insist on hosting this yourself ask
Comcast for an increase of the upload band (to least 10Mbps).

Let's do some rough math:

640kb (~80KB average size) * 10000 (reqs) / 3600 (1hr) = 1.7Mb/s or 2.0Mbps
including protocol overhead

Let's say your app goes viral and assume you get 10000 hits in a period of 10
minutes:

640kb (~80KB average size) * 10000 (reqs) / 600 (10mns) = 10Mb/s or ~11Mbps
including protocol overhead

You might be able get away with this if you offload all static files to a CDN.

Regards

Joe

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pasbesoin
OT: Out of curiosity / my own interest, does your Comcast business class plan
have volume (aka "bandwidth) caps?

