I have a network-based firewall that is connected to many hosts. there are a couple of them that I want to use a specific amount of bandwidth of the internet. I am looking for a way to limit the amount of bandwidth that these clients can use. I was wondering if I can do this with IPTables. There are many other solutions but all of which require some very hard core super complicated programming scripts. I want to be able to do it with simple iptables commands. If not then is there at least a simple way of going about doing this?

Traffic Control HOWTO
Traffic Control using tcng and HTB HOWTO
A Practical Guide to Linux Traffic Control

A quick google search led me to several guides on Linux traffic control. I literally Googled a portion of your subject, "limit bandwidth to certain IP addresses." HINT: iptables can be used to classify traffic but it doesn't do the limiting or queuing of traffic. In guides, iptables is sometimes referred to as netfilter.

I've read about tc, and making scripts for it. But I was hoping that IPTables was able to do those kinds of things but I guess it's limit matching feature is limited. tc may be something I need to learn in order to do these tasks.