[Scifience]

I'm looking for cheap bandwidth. I have a budget of around $500 a month, and was wondering what the best thing I could get into a residential location is. I plan on using it to run a bunch of servers (right now I am paying about $2000 a month to host my sites at a datacenter with 18gbps and can no longer afford this, but still need the ability to handle huge amounts of traffic).

What's the best I can do?

Reposted from http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=253013

[zerostar]

Define 'huge amounts of traffic'

Also where are you located, zip code etc.

[fromthecloud]

Unfortunately, when it comes to running server, upload speed is what you need, and in residential locations you pay dearly as the upload speed goes up.

Depending on where you live, T1 lines are actually becoming feasable for residential locations for those with a larger budget (I never thought I'd say that). I know that several of my CS professors have T1 lines into their house.

Honestly, your best bet for cheap bandwidth is a datacenter where they resell bandwidth to you. You will always get a better deal, since the hosting company buys bandwidth from their ISP in massive quantities and can pass the savings on to you.

[Scotttheking]

You will not get anything near 18gpbs off any line, nor will you get it off any ethernet card in your budget.

What are you doing that requires a lot of bandwidth? How many servers, and what configuration?
I can find 1u/2u colocation @ 5mbps for $90/month, 10mbps @ $350/month, or 10u of space @ 5mbps for $500 per month. You will NOT beat that in a home line (At least not while following the TOS).

If you give more details, people can give more useful information. Depending on what you do, it's very possible to cut bandwidth usage, but I'd need to know what you run, including OS and server software, what you serve up, etc.

--Scott

[Scifience]

I serve up software.

Main site is here: http://www.scifience.net/ Some of you may be familiar with some of my offerings.

Yes, I do get 18gbps speeds. As I said, I pay $2000 a month for hosting in a large datacenter, but the bandwidth is metered at 1500GB.

Right now I have two servers; both are leased from the datacenter. One Linux, one Windows. Apache2 and IIS6, respectively. The reason I'm not looking so much at colo is because I don't have servers that easily fit in a rack available: a big ol' tower is all I've got to use, since as much as I'd like one, I can't exactly afford to buy an Xserve right now.

[macaddict0001]

2000 a month is not bad for that kind of bandwidth, maybe you could find a sponsor or something. to help you pay for it. maybe even host it on their own servers.

[Scotttheking]

Originally Posted by Scifience

I serve up software.

Main site is here: http://www.scifience.net/ Some of you may be familiar with some of my offerings.

Yes, I do get 18gbps speeds. As I said, I pay $2000 a month for hosting in a large datacenter, but the bandwidth is metered at 1500GB.

Right now I have two servers; both are leased from the datacenter. One Linux, one Windows. Apache2 and IIS6, respectively. The reason I'm not looking so much at colo is because I don't have servers that easily fit in a rack available: a big ol' tower is all I've got to use, since as much as I'd like one, I can't exactly afford to buy an Xserve right now.

More info is needed.
What NICs are you using, what country are you in, what are your traffic patterns, what type of data is served up, what are the server specs, etc.?

[Scifience]

I'm in the US - outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Some months my bandwidth usage is around 350GB, others I use well into the 3000s. The NIC and server specs will change since I would no longer be leasing the servers and would need to acquire my own.

The type of data is mostly downloadable applications.

[Scotttheking]

Originally Posted by Scifience

I'm in the US - outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Some months my bandwidth usage is around 350GB, others I use well into the 3000s. The NIC and server specs will change since I would no longer be leasing the servers and would need to acquire my own.

The type of data is mostly downloadable applications.

My rough math says that on a busy month, (3TB) you are averaging a little over 1.2MB/second, or, about 10mbit/second.
That's a LOT.
If you post traffic graphs to see how distributed this is, it would be useful. You could go with T1s to your house, but you'd need at least 7, and @ around $300/month each... A fractional T3 would run well over $2k/month, as well.
You can get 10mbit/sec to a single server for $350/month at a colocation place I looked at.
Looking at your site, you can change the way you compress some files for more savings, and you should enable mod_gzip (mod_compress in Apache2 IIRC) to save yourself some bandwidth. Also look into adding mirrors.

I'd highly suggest sticking to colocation, even with your own server. Tweak what you serve out so that the bandwidth usage is lower.
Without knowing what the servers you have are, I'll just let you know that moving 18Gbps (18 gigabits per second) would require at least 2 10gbit nics teamed. Now, you have zero use for this, but just as an FYI, the xserve has a 1gbit nic

--Scott