To serve or not to serve, That is the question?

[dominickm]

Hi I am building a website. Please bare with me I am a novice.

My site is, when finished probably going to be 10 megabytes. My current web hosting company offers me only 10 gig data transfer a month. So assuming that I get users come on to my site and look at every page, this means I would only be able to get 1024 users a month.

Equation: 10240mb data transfer a month divided by 10 megabytes per each user = 1024 users just in that one month.

My question is... how could I increase that number without paying the ridiculous fees to increase my data transfer allowance? Even if I upgraded to the "premium" plan they have available, it would only add another 10 gig data transfer monthly. Still only increasing the number of users each month to 2048 users seeing every page.

The route I was looking to go was setting up windows server 2003 on my computer and pointing my dot com there. Could I do this?

Would I be able to get 10,000 traffic hits a day, could I get a million? I don’t want to worry about monthly data transfer limits or traffic limits. My computer is a pretty good one. 2 gig athalon, 1 gig memory, 200mb hardrive and my internet connection is cable modem with uploads at 100kbps and downloads at 500kbps, I think.

Would my cable modem company get suspicious or cut me off for doing this... would my cable modem be able to support such hits, would my computer?

Sorry for so many questions, but I would really appreciate any wisdom anyone might have to offer. Should I use windows server, is it hard to set up, would I be able to point my existing dot com to my computer through Windows Server 2003. Should I go some other route besides Windows Server 2003?

Any information is greatly appreciated

Please Help,
Thank you much in advance

Dom

[jeskel]

First of all are you sure that your users will whatch every time they hit your site the 10mg of data available? That's a lot... About self-hosting I had similar worries a few months ago. I got good advices in that thread. You should check it:
http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27999
You should start with what you have now in terms of hosting. If your site is very successful you'll be able to have enough money to pay for a dedicated server. It's a real hassle to host your site yourself. Have you checked http://www.ithium.net? Excellent hosting, low prices. A good place to start. You'll have to email or PM krycek: http://www.codingforums.com/member....fo&userid=4050.

[raf]

I see that we have made at least one convert :D

That each visitor would be browsing a complete10MB site is indeed quite unlikely. Unless you are planning on throwing loads pictures/video/audio at them. But i
suppose you'd then better buy your own satelite then if you want to be able to serve thousands of users a day.
I once was envolved in a streaming video project where we did get such hugh datatransfers, and we just rented capacity for this from a telecom operator and dumped everything on his server. Because our maximum allowed average packagesize (even for intranet applications) was 100k. I believe available bandwidth on the backbone was around 3.5 MB.

Would I be able to get 10,000 traffic hits a day, could I get a million? I don’t want to worry about monthly data transfer limits or traffic limits. My computer is a pretty good one. 2 gig athalon, 1 gig memory, 200mb hardrive and my internet connection is cable modem with uploads at 100kbps and downloads at 500kbps, I think.
Not a chance. But you are just freewheeling here, right? What's your current average page hit ? Because it'll be easier to buy the bandwith, then to have enough users to consume it. 10 000 hits a day on your cable modem (not to mention your machine) ... I don't think so.
I remember a thread here about the monthly trafic for this site (can't find it), which was just a fraction of what you are talking about here.
"Should I use windows server," --> depends on what server side language you plan to use. If it's ASP, then i'd say 'Yes'. Else, i'd look at Apache on a Unix machine
"is it hard to set up," --> it will be harder to keep it running under such high loads + to keep up with all patches and servicepacks
" would I be able to point my existing dot com to my computer through Windows Server 2003" --> ?? your webserver only takes in the requests, processes them and sends a response. But you can point your domain to your personal computer (if you have a fixed IP)

[me']

10mb seems a lot... is it media heavy? If not, have you though about ways to trim it down?

I'm not promising anything, but even 10% reduction would be great.