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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?"
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.
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
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.
If you had to pay for your bandwidth, would you give it for free to some company from which you are currently downloading a product update? I wouldn't...
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.
What I would do is colocate all my servers in a datacenter.
Take a burstable bandwidth, let's say that can burst to 100mbs, but to control your bandwidth in most time to ensure you do not go over the cost, you configure your router to not allow more than let's say 1mb of bandwitdh or whatever you want as a maximum and willing to pay for in normal time.
You should then monitor your bandwidth usage in real time, as well as the logs on the machines, and adjust the traffic shaping to the amount of traffic you want to allow.
For example, you know what on that day, you will do a marketing operation, and you are willing to spend $xxx more for the bandwidth, you then change your setting right before your marketing plan to the maximum of bandwidth you are willing to pay.
my 2c...