Is there a way to calculate what bandwidth is required for our web server prior to our server going live in a data center? We have a web store, do mass emailings to our list of 25,000 customers, and woluld like to also start audio streaming for an internet radio show, handle 1-hour podcasts for the show, and progress into making a library of 4-5 minute video tutorials available online to members. I am running a LAMP stack on RHEL3.0 and using OS apps such as drupal, PHP List, Sugar CRM and RT. The data center has offered us a 1.5 Meg dedicated pipe (not to exceed 1.5 Meg) +$75/Meg excess, or 10 GB total for the entire month. I have no idea if I should choose a dedicated pipe or aggregate monthly bandwidth, or if what they are offering in bandwidth will even be adequate for my purposes. I have no history to base any of this on, as we are coming from a hosted environment on a shared server. Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach this?
How many page views per day do you have? The podcasts will eat up a lot of bandwidth. Do you plan to send only one hour of podcasts per day, or the same 1-hour podcast 24 hours a day? Will it be MP3 encoded? What bitrate? I think 10GB is very sparse - you should try to find a hoster that offers you unlimited bandwidth, like 1&1 or Strato in Germany.
try ntop you can try ntop for checking bandwidth usage for some time and then you can proceed www.ntop.org
