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Monster Bandwidth for a Month?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-billing-options dept.

ourcoolroom asks: "I work for a small regional ISP and we are facing a problem which I'm sure anyone who has tried to read a slashdotted article is well aware of. There are times when a large amount of bandwidth is needed for a short period of time. In our case, a few years ago we had a little 250kB Shockwave Christmas card developed. Any suggestions for hosting something that needs a pile of bandwidth for only 4 weeks or so a year would be appreciated." "We weren't particularly impressed with the results so we didn't distribute it, but we did have it on a sub-domain of our website. It sat around for a year or so, and then about the first week of December all of our data circuits were buried. Apparently a link to the card had started to make its way around in an email. We were able to find a place to host the Shockwave file last year, and towards Christmas transferred around 230GB a day just of the Shockwave file. We don't really stand to make any profit so we can't put a huge bankroll on this project, but we would like to have it up for holiday goodwill (that and it's really cool for a company our size to have a page with over 1,000,000 hits/day). We have thought about distributed downloading via BitTorrent, etc, but we feel many of the people who would view the card would not be that savvy."

4 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There are lots of webhosting places by seinman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Read the fine print. Any host offering "unlimited" bandwidth for that price is only counting HTML and images. Throw in any media file, and your account is closed. I run a site that has lots of video files, and have gotten kicked off of every unlimited bandwidth host that I tried for under $30 a month.

  2. Re:Easy answer by tdemark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or, if you actually want to control the cache, get a box from ServerBeach or EV1 Servers, and install Squid as an accelerator.

  3. Restrictions based upon IP Address? by BladeMelbourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As you are a small ISP, have you thought of restricting access to the shockwave/flash file to your customers only (by IP address range)?

    This can be done programmatically at the ASP/PHP/etc level, or by configuring the virtual directory on the webserver.

    I'm all for spreading Christmas cheer (and my love to the ladies but that's off topic), but your business shouldn't suffer economically, and the bandwidth used should not interfere with the service you are providing to your customers. Restricting content based upon the visitors IP address should help.

    Just an idea, from cloudy Melbourne.

  4. SAVVIS CDN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You could take a look at SAVVIS Communications
    they purchased Cable & Wireless USA who in turn had purchased Digital Island a few years ago.
    They have a similar Content Delivery Network to Akamai but they are much more sensible price-wise.
    and they are reliable (they do most of Microsoft's traffic)

    email: sales@savvis.net

    P.S. "NO - I'm not an employee).