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Managing Bandwidth and Bandwidth Costs?

Posted by Cliff on from the preparations-for-a-slashdotting dept.

azav asks: "The company I work for has bandwidth requirements that occasionally spike to satisfy the immediate requirements of a several meg download to say 30,000 users. We hope to make this several million in the future. With that in mind, this request is directed to any person who manages a site that must deliver content on an irregular schedule. How do you manage your bandwidth costs? How do you manage the availability of bandwidth?"

"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?"

11 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Many Options by voxel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  2. Managing bandwidth by js62 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Managing bandwidth by Neophytus · · Score: 3, Informative

      What must be noted is that a custom tracker would almost be a necessity. Trackers overload REAL easy, so having one you can run over a load balanced system or that keeps CPU and memory usage to a bare minimum is a must.

    2. Re:Managing bandwidth by KDan · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, this is one thing where it would probably be VERY worthwhile to write a custom bit-torrent client (which looks like one of these installers which goes and downloads the data from a server, but actually goes and downloads it from everyone else). Just give people a choice in the maximum speed of the download, eg: 20k/sec if you don't want to share, 150k/sec if you're willing to share the file 10 times, and max out bandwidth if they're willing to share it whenever the application is open. Seeing as it seems you're distributing updates to an application, incorporating a bit-torrent client in the app shouldn't be beyond possibility, and even if only 10% of people who say they'll be sharing actually let it through their firewall, that will still make it a lot easier on your servers.

      Daniel

      --
      Carpe Diem
  3. Get what you want... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Get Burstable Fibre by manly_15 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 :-)

  5. Akamai or other offsite hosting by sully67 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Find a new provider... by IpSo_ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  7. CDN, colocation by UnderAttack · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  8. Content Delivery Network by ryuspeed · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Colocation! by danejasper · · Score: 5, Informative
    Colocation or contracted file hosting is probably your best bet. You'll pay by the gigabyte, or by peak utilization. Careful as you quote this - a 95th percentile means that they bill you monthly for the PEAK after tossing out the top 5%. For a site which is pretty even all month long, this works great. However, if you're serving a single file, once in a while, and expect heavy traffic only then, you do NOT want to pay on 95th, as you'll pay for your peak utilization all month long.

    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.