popular website owners, what's your traffic stats?

[Bimmerboy]

popular website owners, what\'s your traffic stats?

I'm loooong overdue to change my website host, and after some research I'm looking at a few, but especially one in particular.
They get excellent ratings on their tech support, the prices are very good, their data center has very good equipment and they actually own the data center... it's not co-located (verified by the reviewer who visited them), healthy amount of server space, excellent uptime, and a bunch of other good things. There's just one problem. The bandwidth limitations are among the lowest for the price that I've seen. Only 10 gigs/month.
That may sound like a lot, and it is. It'll suit me fine for a little while. However, I'm in the process of rebuilding my site which will include a large amount of mp3 files for people to download of mine and other people's guitar playing, some lesson video samples, pictures, etc. Who knows, if the site gets even a little popular, 10 gigs can rack up and then you're looking at overage charges. The next price plan up with this company only jumps to 20 gigs/month. Everything about this host sounds great, except for the bandwidth. The customer service and tech support are supposed to be among the best, so I'd hate to give that up just for a lot of bandwidth from some other host.
So here's my question to owners of popular websites.
What are your traffic stats, and just how quickly does 10 gigs of traffic add up on a well visited site?

EDIT: shameless plug... my site is at High Performance Guitar

 

[watt4]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

a large amount of mp3 files for people to download of mine and other people's guitar playing, some lesson video samples, pictures, etc.

this could use up the transfer quickly

what are your stats now? (visits and transfer)

many hosts will let you upgrade to a bigger plan when you outgrow a smaller one.

a reference point: I have an image gallery site that gets a little over 5,000 visits a month, and averages between three and four gigs of transfer per month.

 

[Greta]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

CPF uses 6.5 gigs a day.

 

[Bimmerboy]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

Watt - is that 5000 unique hits, or say if 1000 people average 5 hits by browsing your images?

Sasha - Roughly 200 gigs a month?... YOW! Pretty busy site ya' got there.

Thanks to both of you for the perspective. I may be getting myself into anaylsis paralysis again and want to catch it before it spirals out of control... I'll research it beyond death for the next 4 weeks before deciding.
So, at 10 gigs a month, 1/20th of CPF's traffic is still a lot for some (yet) unknown guitar site. I probably don't have to worry, and most likely, the technical support is worth the trade off.
Before the credit card comes out, I'm gonna' contact a guitarist friend of mine who's actually quite popular, about his site.
In the meantime, anyone else have input on this?
Thanks again.

 

[jtice]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

I use www.globat.com as my host, and love it.
VERY good up time, good speeds.
My plan is about $9 a month, with 2GB storage and 60GB per month bandwidth.
Heres some stats from March.

Unique visitors 2975
Hits 185023
Bandwidth 5.69 GB

 

[Greta]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

Give a call to the tech support guys at this new server that you're thinking about. Tell them where you're at now and where you hope to be in a year. They should be able to advise you what you should start out with now and what kind of upgrades will be needed when you get where you want to be. There is no need to pay for the service that you want to have in a year if you don't need it now. They can properly guide you... especially if you are a potential new customer. I did this with another site and the tech guys were great! Remember that it is in THEIR best interest not to screw you over now and to help you help your site grow properly without driving you into debt... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

 

[Bimmerboy]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

Just found out some verrry interesting information. I'll talk about it here as I'm not going to name names or get too deep into the jeers.
The host I was thinking about earlier? Well, I almost made the mistake of signing up with this apparently un-reputable company. In fact, the "parent" company that owns some of these hosting providers has been creating fake review sites around the net, and havoc with many of their customers in terms of support and billing. I almost got sucked in. I've now seen transcripts of trouble ticket dialog between host (involving more than one support tech) and customer, and man, that says a lot. I worked tech help desk for 3 1/2 years for a super large corporation, and would've faced some serious reprimands if I tried giving this kind of low caliber support. Enough said, you get the idea.
Back to the drawing board.

 

[The_LED_Museum]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

I use AT&T Worldnet as my primary ISP.
Back in late-2000, my website got Slashdotted, and passed 16.7 terabytes of bandwidth in a single day, and had more than 100,000 visitors that same day.
So with AT&T, bandwidth isn't an issue, but you only get 60MB of web storage to work with.

 

[watt4]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

[ QUOTE ]
Bimmerboy said:
Watt - is that 5000 unique hits, or say if 1000 people average 5 hits by browsing your images?

[/ QUOTE ]

over 5,000 visits to the site. those visits generate over 40,000 page views, and between 400,000 and 500,000 file "hits".

[ QUOTE ]
Bimmerboy said:
So, at 10 gigs a month, 1/20th of CPF's traffic is still a lot for some (yet) unknown guitar site.

[/ QUOTE ]

yes. don't worry about it for a while. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif you have an upgrade option where you are, so there is nothing to worry about.

 

[gadget_lover]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

The_LED_Museum has a good idea.

There's no reason why you can't have copies of your files in multiple places, and then change the links as desired to avoid hitting limits. In Craigs's setup he uses AT&T and gets good service.

I would use an ultra reliable service for the HTML and host the mp3 and video on a less expensive server. If the file server has problems you can easily change the links to point to a backup copy.

I tend to shy away from bandwidth based pricing for network access. If you get slashdotted you use up your quota quickly. This can trigger several conditions, depending on your contract. I worked with one firm that had their monthly rate double because of extra network traffic they did not anticipate.

My site? I get less than 1000 hits per day, total bandwidth less than 50 megbit.

Daniel

 

[bobisculous]

Re: popular website owners, what\'s your traffic st

I am with jtice on this. He told me about them and I have been very pleased with their service. Uptime is been perfect, speeds are Alright...the problem is on my end, me having a crappy cable connection thats capped.
Comes with emails out the wazoo(something like 2500).
3.5GBs of space, which I can easily use all of if I wanted to. So I have to be slightly careful. Then 75GB of transfer or something like that a month...never even came close. I have done at most 1GB a day.
You can FTP all you want though. That doesnt count towards your monthly transfer. Me and a buddy of mine went in on it and we are constantly trasfering files to each other. Some large ones to, works good.

Cameron