Slashdot Mirror
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?"
1) Agree with your ISP on a standard data rate, burstable to X as needed.
2) Use RTG to monitor traffic in and out, making sure that you know what switch/ports/etc. that client is using.
3) Charge the client (this is usally done based on 95th percentile).
4) Profit!!!
libertarianswag.com
As soon as we all have 50mpbs 802X connections and, anonymous P2P software. This kind of question will never be asked.
With 100 gig hds, and reliable high speed connectivity 24/7. It's pretty easy to see what could be built from that.
Someone wants to download the new 150mb CS or BF1942 upgrade? Just enter the name of the file, select it...and the P2P software does the rest. Initiating multiple downloads from about 20 or so nodes in parallel. Then you just glue the program together once you have downloaded all the pieces.
Mirroring is such a hack, and dynamic bandwidth is the last gasp of the client-server paradigm. Let's move on.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Based on recent research at the University of Waterloo, you may well be able to treat the bandwidth usage as a risk factor and treat the option to buy more bandwidth as exactly that: an option on a real commodity. You would likely be able, then, to price the value of waiting to invest versus the value of investing now with a given expected return. Basically the cost of holding off on investing would then be quantifiable and you could choose the best time for investment.
There has been some good research done on this lately which you can read up on at the U. Waterloo Scientific Computation Group which did the work in co-operation with telecoms and the Finance department. The math is perhaps a little heavy going, but the results may put you on a firmer footing than doing the same computation with NPV or similar methods.
Disclaimer: I'm currently doing research with this group, though not exactly on this topic.
Let's face it. Most of the suggestions above are useless. Since when is a company going to officially distribute stuff via Kazaa or BitTorrent? Sorry, but when Microsoft says 'To download our latest Service Pack, use Kazaa' then pigs will be flying. It's so unprofessional.
The easiest solution is not to host it yourself, but to use specialized file hosting ISPs. There are lots of these around, and it's a trivial task on Google to find one at the price you want. These are ISPs that entirely focus on hosting large files for download, with servers optimized for that job.
There's no point in lagging out your regular servers which are probably optimized for something else.. and a dedicated file host can scale as you go.. which would usually cost you a packet.