hi,

i'd like to go away from our current hosting provider and serve our web & mail from our own server, on a 256kbps (upstream) DSL circuit. i'm nervous about whether or not we have enough bandwidth to do this.

our site is built with Flash, and has a lot of QuickTime movies and hi-res images. our stats show that the most traffic we've passed in a month is ~5GB. here's a screen grab of all web stats.

http://bentimagelab.com/Stats.gif

i know the DSL circuit could handle this on a day to day basis. but what about the busy days? anyone have a formula they use to figure this stuff out?

When one person on 512K cable/ADSL visits your website you don't have enough bandwidth to send to them at
maximum speed. If you want you website to load as fast as possible then it is not a good idea.
Do you care if your visitors have to wait longer?

When you run your own server you are responsible for applying patches for secuirty holes. When the website is down you get the blame immediatly.
Maybe that is good for your job security, maybe it is bad for your sanity.

I can't look at the site, you don't even have a "skip intro". Since the introduction of adverts that hover on top of webpages I won't install flash/shockwave ever.

256Kbit/sec probably won't be enough if you have a lot of rich media on your site. I run a website and e-mail off a DSL ciruit with 386Kbit/sec upstream, but the biggest thing on my sites is several dozen well cropped pictures and I don't send a lot of outbound mail. I haven't had any contention problems so far, but then again I don't get many visitors, either.

thanks. i'm pretty familiar with the responsibilities that come with this. i also enjoy a challenge, that's what keeps my learning new things. flexibility and cost are the main reasons i'm thinking of moving these services onto our own network.

i don't mind if they have to wait a little bit longer than they do now, as long as it's not like dial-up speeds. my main concern is how our upstream bandwidth would relate to the stats i posted. make sense? i don't want to have a bottleneck during the busy times you know? so if we upgrade to 512kbps up, we can have roughly 20 simultaneous visitors getting 20kbps downloads correct? i that's pretty decent, if my calculations are correct. (i already subtracted TCP/IP overhead.)

there's no 'skip intro' because the site is all Flash. it's built for creativity and expression. not Linux geeks that use Lynx exclusively, or non-Flash enabled browsers. btw, i'm not trying to single you out, i'm talking about all of us.