I am trying to figure out if our hosting plan has enough bandwidth
(currently at 15Mbps, our average webpage is 300kb).
One of our members may win a peace prize for scientific work so there may
be a media blitz.
Does anyone know how much traffic a 'media blitz' (for lack of a better
word) generates?
I can bump it to 50Mbps but I am not even sure if that is enough.
There is no telling how big a flash crowd might be. I've see them jump in the Gbps range and not Mbps.
Would cloudflare caching (free tier?) help in this case? Maybe easier than
upgrades for short time traffic bump.
One of our customers went from near zero traffic to requiring a 2Gbps
bond over the course of a few days, so just another +1 that it can be
in the Gbps range when one of your customers explodes, especially if
it's a media rich site without CDN.
Treatment of this scenario by beefing up hardware or hosting plans, or
temporarily increasing your metered limit is insufficient. Use a CDN for
all static content, all the time. If your site averages low volume, it'll
be very cheap. If you get a million page views in the first minute, you'll
be glad to pay.
Regardless of who is hosting, the host machine is most likely to hit
OS/stack equivalents of either Apache Max Clients limits, or Mysql
max_connections. It comes down to requests per second, and the memory or
compute resources necessary to respond to each of those requests at
internet scale. If not arbitrary daemon config limits, then probably the
host hardware is crippled well before the link could become saturated, or
you'd even surpass a metered rate.
For instance https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ quotes 8.5 cents/GB
for the first 10TB/mo. At 300KB/page view, that's $25 per 1 million page
views, and reasonable confidence that the necessary compute resources will
be instantly available when the wave hits. The are many CDN services
available. Your origin wont even feel it, just use reasonable expiry times.
Your hosting company may be able to set up a CDN for you, or set it up
yourself:
- let your hosted site respond to a new alias like origin.mysite.com
- set up the CDN distribution
- point your domain's www CNAME to your new distribution
Enjoy a worldwide caching reverse proxy with limitless resources, priced
per page view. Maybe someone can recommend a IPv6 capable CDN service.
Cloudflare. Also does IPv6 on the client facing side while doing IPv4 to
you.
We had a tragic incident on campus in 2007. Our dual 1G's died right
away, and we hurried to deploy an in-progress 10G link install that day, and
*that* barely kept up with the hits even when we stripped the webpage down
to about 20K of static text.
Unfortunately for humanity and fortunately for your bandwidth budget,
a peace price is unlikely to generate as much traffic as tragedy.
Does anyone know how much traffic a 'media blitz' (for lack of a better
word) generates?
Disclaimer I work for a CDN of but I'm a former consumer of such
services as well.
if you have recourse to a CDN it can be farily straight forward to shift
the serving of resources to or away from it in reponse to demand. if you
have an existing setup with a CDN, control of your DNS, reasonably short
TTLs, and decent seperation of resource names from the physical machines
on which they reside this can be done without anticipation, rather quickly.
It's cheap and easy enough to experiment with a least some of these
services that you can experiment with them for little or sometimes no
cost prior to employing them.
joel