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Managing Bandwidth and Bandwidth Costs?
"I'd like to illustrate the second concept. When you have your (for example) T1 and you're not really using it, you are still paying for all that bandwidth. It's like the car that sits in your garage, you're still paying insurance and car payments on it even though you're not using it. But then you put up a new game, serve new media or suddenly become the 'Site of the Day' and your bandwidth is flooded and maxed out. For that case, it's like you've bought a car that only goes 40 miles an hour but while the demand exists and only while that demand exists, you need a car that goes 150 miles an hour. You don't want to pay the money for a car that goes 150 because you only need it occasionally. Later, you know you'll need that car to go 220 but you're not there yet.
So if this makes sense with regards to bandwidth, it is like you'd want burst-bandwidth depending on need. Do any of you face this problem? If you do and have solved it, I'd love to hear about your strategy. Once this is solved, we get back to the first question, how do you manage that cost, put a number on it and either fit it in to your business model or pass it on to your customers?"
Too many to spell out here.. Search google, LOTS of people sell bandwidth at X mbits/s with a BURST to x mbit/s.
You figure our how much you will estimate you will use as a total per month, and you pay for that. You cruise at 2mbit/s mostly, then you explode to 145mbit/s and at the end of the month you average out to 6mbit/s.
The idea is you BUY your peak speed, but pay for a low average..
EVERYONE does this now, call around... It was kind of silly for you to ask Slashdot how to do this. UGH.
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Where possible BitTorrent is your friend. If you can use it, let your customers help out with the bandwidth usage. They will probably get the file(s) quicker and you won't have servers getting torched.
If you want to pay for data by the gig, rather than by the pipe size, just sign up with an ISP which allows that.
At the ISP where I work we offer fiber connections that allow for increased bandwidth for certain periods of time. For example, our burstable connections are usually around 1-3 meg for normal times, then burstable up to 10 megs. I'm sure you can find something suitable to you.
:-)
*blatant sales pitch*
If your buisness is near Southern Ontario, check out our website at www.sentex.net. We rock
This is what Akamai and the like are sold for.
It's almost certainly going to be cheaper than just buying bandwidth.
Or you could go for the approach of colocating your own box somewhere central for the heavily hit stuff.
Even this will be a whole lot cheaper and won't impact on your normal traffic to your organisation.
ALTQ
This guy is way out there
that offers "pay by the GB". The hosting company I work for has GiGE links but only pays for the exact amount of traffic we push through the link. The monthly cost on the line is minimal, or nonexistent depending on the provider.
Since we have more then one link as well, it gives us redundancy and the upper hand to negotiate the best price per GB, so we can send 90% of our traffic out that link. If the next month a different provider comes back with a cheaper price, we switch it around and send the 90% out their link. Within days of cutting the traffic off for a link, we can usually expect a phone call from the sales rep with lower price offer.
Any idle links we have don't cost us anything extra, since we _will not_ deal with any provider that doesn't offer pay by the GB. Paying for the raw link speed, regardless of how much traffic you push through, or paying 95th percentile prices are all mostly a rip off.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Couple of different options. First, you could talk to the Content Delivery Networks (CDN's) like Akamai or Digital Island. They can probably help you (for a price).
Another option is colocation. In particular if you have short traffic spikes. Many colocation places charge your for at a '95 Percentile'. This will cut out about 3 days worth of 'peek traffic' and you only pay for the maximum bandwidth you use after removing the top 5%. Just make sure the colocation place has enough bandwidth to handle the spikes.
Some ISPs (e.g. Yipes) offer flexible contracts that allow fast (daily?) bandwidth changes. So if you announce a new version of your product, you can increase your bandwidth until the rush is over.
One hint: Try to move the large file/content away from your 'importants' networks, so other things like e-mail keep flowing even if the content site is running into issues due to load.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
It seems to me that this is exactly the type of problem that places like akamai and cable and wireless (was digital island) are trying to solve. Pay only for the bandwidth you use, leverage their existing distributed architecture, profit. You can try to get bustable bandwidth etc, but in the past I've found it to be more expensive. Things may have changed since them (a year ago) but you should still look into a content delivery network.
Start with a best guess for amount of bandwidth based on number of users and type of usage. Then monitor and adjust. If you pay for uneeded bandwidth you may be losing money. If underestimate bandwith needs and lose business, you may lose money...
Some things to consider checking into:
Use SNMP and RMON to manage and monitor your wide area connections. You will be able to do trending on your traffic to see what percentage of used is used during any predetermined interval. Free tools like MRTG are a great place to start.
Good network hardware, maybe most specifically your edge router(s) and firewall(s), that allows you to configure some sort of priority queuing or traffic shaping. Cisco's QOS features in its IOS based routers are known to be particularly strong.
A service or dedicated person to make sense of the traffic reports. It is an ongoing process.
You will also likely want to consider measuring "latency" as well as bandwidth consumption.
Also note that during a one minute average, 50% use can be 30 seconds of 100% and 30 seconds of 0%. Be aware that many of the bandwidth utilization numbers that are reported can be averages. You will want to look for peaks as well.
Good Luck.
~8^]
How to handle this situation primarily depends on where your site is hosted.
If you have your servers hosted with co-location provider like AT&T, Globix, Cable and Wireless (ha ha), Verio ot the like then you'll almost always have the option to "burst" above your monthly allotment of transfer per month - problem solved. Just do some simple math and figure out what is the max of the LAN connection of the provider, how much your server(s) can handle with respect to transfer and you'll be able to figure out if you need to add hardware or NIC's to handle the load. Generally speaking the "bursting" is usually calculated fairly. Also, in months that you use less bandwidth you won't have to pay for a higher class of service above the already agreed upon monthly transfer rates.
However, It doesn't sound like this is the case. A t-1 has a physical capacity to transfer 1.544 Mb/sec. You will never be able to "burst" above this rate. As long as your servers are at the end of this pipe they will never be able to transfer more than ~ 180K/sec to the internet at large. Your options at this point are:
* Add more capacity to your hosting site (expensive).
* "Partner" with a company like Akamai for content delivery. It'll be a few thousand dollars plus the cost of bandwith to set up the content redistribution. Not really a bad deal if you are serious about delivering your content to your users. They also have great reporting about who and where your users are coming from.
* Your last option is to set up a shared/dedicated hosting account with a provider that charges you by the GB. That way you only pay for what you use + the monthly cost of the server. Try interland they have some good deals.
The bottom line is that if your site is hosted at the end of a physical connection you own - it's not going to be enough. You'll need a datacenter environment that has a PhatPipe to the internet and a machine or machine(s) that can handle the throughput. If you have the cash go with Akamai - they are good at what they do.
First of all, you need to know what's normal for your network, and how your bandwidth is actually being used:
h no logies_white_paper09186a008017f93b.shtml
d ex .pl?i=Technologies&f=1387
http://www.linuxgeek.org/netflow-howto.php
http://wwwstats.net.wisc.edu/
http://www.arbornetworks.com/products_sp.php
Then you need to make use of technologies which allow you to provision accordingly:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/tec
http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/Support/browse/in
Juniper and other vendors have equivalent capabilities, I'm just not very familiar with them. But the concepts are the same.
Be sure to tell your colo or file hosting provider what your projected usage is, and how many megabits you may want access to, to assure that they can handle it. You may also want to make a courtesy call a day or so prior to each launch to let them know what to expect.
Remember when Eddy Van Halen got tounge cancer a couple years ago? THAT was a busy weekend for their website, which we host. Of course, they didn't have any warning, but boy-o, that was bigger than any slashdot effect that I've ever seen. We also host O'Reilly (the computer book folks), so we certainly see plenty of slashdotting.
We're at: http://www.sonic.net/sales/colo/
Shop around - but keep in mind that buying from someone near your intended downloader may help you with both latency and costs. The SF Bay Area has the best pricing for bandwidth, and the lowest latency connections to the highest number of users - that said, if your target market is on the east coast, you should be in Hearndon, VA or NY or Boston.
-Dane Jasper (Sonic.net)
-- Dane Jasper Sonic.net, Inc.