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Christmas Cheer The Almighty Buck The Internet

Monster Bandwidth for a Month? 46

Posted by Cliff 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."
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Monster Bandwidth for a Month? More

Monster Bandwidth for a Month?

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  • Easy answer (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:21PM (#10849055)
    Just Coral Cache [nyu.edu] it.

  • There are lots of webhosting places (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    which offer unlimited traffic for only about $20/month. Pick one of them.

  • Akamai is your friend (Score:5, Informative)

    by hrbrmstr ( 324215 ) * on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:30PM (#10849143) Homepage Journal
    Specifically, their EdgeSuite [akamai.com].

    From what I remember, you only pay for what bandwidth is consumed and since most folks will consider your e-card spam, that won't be many. The cost was fairly reasonable as well.
    • and towards Christmas transferred around 230GB a day

      Spam or not, that would indeed seem like a sizeable amount of bandwidth.
    • Or one of their competitors (which you may like better) like Savvis (fka Digital Island) or Speedera.
      • The original article says: 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 probably rules out Akamai. They seem to enjoy their reputation for having the highest priced bandwidth.

        One way you can still make use of commerical Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is by using refer blocking or a secure download [speedera.com] service, where the file will be delivered from the CDN only by use of a time-expiring URL from your sit

  • Do the AOL thing... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:33PM (#10849175) Homepage Journal
    Pass out CDs.

    *runs away*

  • Where's the link? (Score:4, Funny)

    by sabNetwork ( 416076 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:40PM (#10849224)
    Link? :)

    -

  • Restrictions based upon IP Address? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:42PM (#10849235)
    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.
    • well, from what i'd gather the service would be to make the customers able to 'send' those shockwave cards to their friends, who are on other isp's.

      (or a link to them anyways, at least that would make a lot more sense - make it customisable by the url or something)

  • One Word .... Akamai. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ebooher ( 187230 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:53PM (#10849307) Homepage Journal

    http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/overview.html/ [akamai.com]

    Akamai is the global leader in distributed computing solutions and services, helping organizations grow their online businesses without growing their IT infrastructures. The company created the world's largest and most widely used on-demand distributed computing platform, with more than 14,000 servers in 1,100 networks in 65+ countries.

    Now is the time to show how little I know from working with a company that housed servers for Akamai.

    Akamai is basically a huge cache system. Many of the internet favorites that people hit on a regular basis are Akamai customers. Apple, BMW, FedEx, etc. They are all companies that know they have a pretty big userbase and need to be able to give those customers a good chunk of bandwidth. However it is impossible and impractical to install the needed bandwidth for one site .... say IBM.

    Now, I know you say "But IBM is this huge goliath of a company that has customers worldwide." That doesn't mean it is cost effective for them to install 14,000 OC-128's to handle all the traffic. Akamai provides a way of distributing your information in a way that allows people to pull that information from a site that is technologically near to them.

    Let's not go into how a certain cable company goes to *New York* before passing any traffic to *California* So I did not mean geographically near.

    Anyway .... I know nothing about their rates or services or even if they are cheaper than running 14,000 OC-128's to your office. I like to exaggerate and embellish, ok. I'd hate to see the SONET gear needed to switch 14,000 circuits. But they would be a good bet for you. Because your customer would hit your site. Click the link for whatever 4 Meg, etc app you need them to run, the link would find the closest Akamai center and bam .... they'd probably be downloading it from Japan when they are in Wyoming .... but hey, what are you going to do with technology, right?

    Just my three cents.

  • If its not mission critical, I would go with Server Beach - for about 100 dollars you get 2000 GB of bandwidth! there is no contract, and server set up only takes a day in most cases. I went with them for a 3 month short term project where we used the server for DNS purposes. Customer service was EXCELLENT.

    Good luck!

  • Static content is a LOT easier than dynamic conten (Score:3, Informative)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:59PM (#10849358) Homepage
    I have a similar problem with my christmas lights [komar.org] which include a christmas webcam [komar.org] ... except my content is dynamic ... so I just grin-n-bear it during the Slashdot Effect [komar.org]

    Since yours is static, maybe you could talk to the MirrorDot folks [mirrordot.com] and see if they would host it.

    P.S. I just turned on the environmental senors for the christmas webcam, so stop by if you want a real-time look at Colorado weather.

  • Several options (Score:5, Informative)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:06PM (#10849427) Homepage Journal
    There are many things you can do, some which will help lower bandwidth and requests, others will simply cost money to implement.

    First, put a meta cache tag in the web page, and make sure your webserver responds properly to "Has this page changed" requests. A lot of downloads are simply going to be people playing it over and over again - by going to your web page. Let the proxies and caches do their job by making sure they know your page isn't changing for a month.

    Second, lower the bandwidth. The music is one obvious spot - select a lower quality encoding. Simplify the flash as much as possible. You may not be able to do much, but if you completely re-think it you will be surprised how small a high quality flash can be.

    Develop the website properly. Put in a message that says "Please wait while loading..." since many web users will impatiently click on the url over and over if they don't see the flash immediately, causing extra stress and bandwidth on the server. In the extreme, consider limiting downloads and queuing visitors. "Your card will show in 25 seconds, please wait."

    Also be aware of content thieves. Make sure your server is configured to upload the content only to users who have specifically requested your webpage (not just the file on the page). If you look through the server logs of old you may find a lot of referrer tags coming from sites that embedded your url on their page and got revenue on your work, without paying for the bandwidth, nevermind obeying copyright laws.

    Third, you need at minimum a bandwidth of 25Mb/s (assuming you meant 230Gbytes, and not 230Gbits). The real minimum is actually closer to twice that since the bursty traffic will be at least twice the average traffic. This means you need to host a dedicated server with someone who has a T3 or greater dedicated to your use. This is big bucks. You may find that it will be cheaper working with a content distribution service such as Akamai.

    Lastly, while notriety is nice, and it's fun to see everyone looking at you, make sure you are weighing all the costs - including your sanity - against the percieved benefit. For this type of thing, if you aren't making money then it usually isn't worth it.

    -Adam
  • You can configure your apache webservers to only allow each connection a limited amount of bandwidth depending on which IP the connection is coming from. It can be setup to allow more bandwidth for your customers or less from connections outside your network. This can be configured for the entire site or just for the file that is getting hit hard.
    This is a simple and inexpensive solution.

  • Cache services (Score:4, Informative)

    by Evil Attraction ( 150413 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:05PM (#10849801)
    I've been using the Coral P2P Cache service [slashdot.org] from time to time, especially when I've encountered Slashdotted web pages. They only require you to add "nyud.net:8090" to a hostname, and thus it seems like a simple solution in this case. There are other - and similar - services out there as well (which I haven't tried as much as the Coral thing);
    • Freecache [slashdot.org]
    • MirrorDot [mirrordot.org] is for web pages mentioned in Slashdot articles only.
    Good luck!
  • Your best friend Mr Google [google.com] has many high [bulkeagle.com] bandwidth [elogic.cc] cheap [buprhost.com] short [cheapbulletproof.com] term [a1-bulkemailhost.com] hosts [bullet-pro...ing.com.ni] conviently listed under the search term Bullet Proof Hosting [google.com]. Compared to what you normally pay for bandwidth these guys can hook you up good.

    SD
    • /. is not really the place to ask this question. Try

      WebHostingTalk [webhostingtalk.com] forum instead.

      eg.
      http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.ph p?s=&th readid=343281

      or
      http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php ?s=&th readid=335093
      or even this thread (crikey, 5TB/month):
      http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthr ead.php?s=&th readid=342082

      I think most unmetered servers will come to $200/mo or so.

      eg.
      Ev1Servers [ev1servers.net]
      Although they're all sold out, you could do worse than contact them and see if they have something f

  • SAVVIS CDN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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).
  • ../let's you get 2TB of data transfer for less than $150/mo. Get two of those servers for two months and you're talking less than $1G.
  • Set the embed tag on your page to a colocated/shared server at a big ISP.

    For instance, I use 1&1 [1and1.com]. They have a package that's $20/mo for 100GB of transfer, plus $1/GB of traffic after that. You can set a cap on $/mo you want to spend right on the control panel.

    For your quarter-meg Christmas card, that's like 200 views per Cent you spend for the first 400000 views and 40 views per cent after that. That's pretty damn cheap advertising.

    • Re:Umm, Colocation? (Score:2, Informative)

      by rimmon ( 608966 )
      The article talks about 230GB/day. That's 6900 GB per month (30 days). With your package that would add up to 6820, that's about 8900 US$. That is not a good deal, that is awfully expensive...
  • How about scaling to multiple systems? Sign up for inexpensive hosting plans from a variety of vendors.
    -If it is a media file for download
    >use a simple cgi/php/asp/j2ee/jsp/whatever to rotate users to each of the sites round-robin style. I'm sure there's pre-made ones on the net or on freshmeat
    -If it is text/images
    >host the primary HTML on the main site and reference the images or accessory HTML/CSS on the other sites
    -If content is dynamicly generated
    > that's another discussion entirely

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