bandwidth advice needed

i plan to set up a new site selling ebooks. how much bandwidth do you think i will need a month? a rough figure, i know it all depends on traffic, number of products, etc.

 

That's impossible to tell.

What's your hunch on traffic, number of books and average page size / book size in Kb?

 

i don't know much about the amount of traffic i may get.

the books are 50% < 1 MB, 25% between 1 and 4 MB and a few monstrosities up to 8 MB.

 

If you don't know about traffic I assume you don't have any current traffic you are planning to direct to this. So it's basically a brand new venture starting from scratch. If you also don't have any advertising budget and hence not studied predicted AdWords etc. traffic I take it you start with 0 the first day.

Get the smallest bandwidth you can get to keep cost low. Once you find out how quick it grows or once you know the predicted traffic/bandwidth levels for the next few months you can upgrade accordingly.

 

However, if you do it that way, check out the upgrade prices first. You might wind up paying more to upgrade bandwidth with some companies then you will spend getting a lot of banwidth right off the bat from another company.

Jim

 

Most established hosts are scalable and have easy/free upgrade options available. Just check into whomever you plan to go with first and make sure this is the case. If they don't state it clearly on their site you can always ask them in a pre-sales email.

It's silly to pay for resources today you may not need for months or more until your traffic levels rise.

HTH,
Scott

 

My general experience with buying bandwidth is that you will get far more than you need initially with almost any basic hosting plan because the hosting industry is so competitive that all bandwidth is 'oversold' behind the scenes. Thus, most hosts include plenty of bandwidth (ie 1000GB / month) on basic hosting plans, under the philosophy that 90% of their customers won't use a fraction of what they're offering. So I wouldn't worry too much about this issue, unless you're doing a very high bandwidth activity (ie free hosting), it's more important just to find a reliable host at a fair price.

 

Well, I'm assuming that people will only be able to download the eBook after having bought it. Let's take a very good estimate of around 1000 sales a month and multiply that by the largest size (8MB)

1000 x 8MB = 8GB

So a good start should be to look at hosting packages that give you at least 5-10GB of data transfer a month. Many beginner packages offer that now, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find. It's very unlikely you will ever use the total amount of bandwidth for the first year or more, but should give you more than enough to play around with.

 

nice! i can share this new domain with my current host who offers 50GB a month then.

does addon domain means i can host two TLDs in one hosting package?

 

If your host allows it you can host your second level domain in the same account via the add-on domain route.

Note: top level means .com, .net etc.
Yourdomain.com is a second level domain

Colbyt

 

*smacks forehead* thanks for the correction. damn...858 posts and i sound like a complete newbie.