When I release my new design, I'm *probably* going to get featured in a few CSS galleries. With CSS Mania being one of the busiest (and one that accepts the most designs), it's likely I'll be featured there. Probably a few others too, if I'm lucky.


I have 600GB of bandwidth, and I have NO idea whether that's a lot, too little or only okay. I've never really had to worry about it before. I'm currently using only about 220MB of that.
I see many websites featured go over their limit, which to me is defeating the purpose of being featured in the first place - so I do not want that to happen.

Your help is appreciated,
Ed.

Well confidence is a good thing I guess...

If you burn through 600GB of bandwidth in a month then your site is 1) Serving up about 100 MB per page view or 2) getting more visitors than you know what to do with.

600GB is easily enough -- most hosting packages offer 5-10 GB of transfer each month.

First off, who is your website host? I'd be willing to bet that if you consumed any where near 600 GB your website host would kick you off in a heart beat! (That is, unless you are on a dedicated server...if that's the case then you should be allowed to use all the resources as they are not overselling.) But, in reality, 600 GB is a LOT of bandwidth, and should be more then enough...LOL!

Hmm...I'm hosted with Bravenet (they're great).

Attached is a view of my control panel with my information on bandwidth! And by the way, I have no idea what kind of server I'm on. I know I sound really thick, but I've been hosted with them a long time...and I didn't have a clue about that when I started.

All I know is that I can host up to 10 websites, and I have two accounts with them.


Ed.

This post has been edited by Vivara: Sep 13 2008, 08:11 AM

Personally, I wouldn't worry about it. But any worrying should be moderated by numbers:

Your "v3" hompage is 178 kb. To use 600 Gb of bandwidth a month, you would need about 3.5 million page views.

Most visitors from a CSS showcase will only look at the homepage of your site. So we're talking about maybe 2 -- 3 million visitors a month. That sounds a little far-fetched. At best, I would expect you to get a few hundred a day (*edit* maybe high hundreds to low thousands). A quick Google search reveals some (admittedly weak) anecdotal evidence:

• Showing off and getting traffic
• Random Jabber featured on CSS mania

...and if you really think you will get millions of visitors, stick some Adsense up immediately after being accepted to the showcase.

Ehemm. That's not the site I'm working on, nice try.

Have a sneak peek here: (LINK REMOVED!)

There's a reason for the long name, he he. I know I could have named it something shorter, and you still wouldn't have found it, but I'm crazy. I'll be renaming it in a sec once you've looked.

Ed.

Boy, you really fell for that one. Looks great, by the way. Revise the calculation:

178/250 * 3.5 million = 2.5 million page views to suck your bandwidth dry. That would require a high proportion of CSS mania's visitors to click through to your site (say, 75%).

But what if I was featured elsewhere?

Ed.

I have the option to double it to 1.2TB for 3 months, I think.

I still think you're safe -- your site is nice but it's not 3 million+ visitors a month nice.

If you got featured on lots of CSS showcases, all at the same time, then maybe you would run out of bandwidth. But still probably not.

It's entirely up to you. I think the scenario you're painting is unlikely; besides, you can always upgrade after you see the first 300 Gb disappear over ten days.

A closer look at Bravenet terms you might find these areas helpful....



You are currently hosted on a shared server and your host is overselling! When a web host sells more space, bandwidth or CPU cycles than they have at their disposal, with the belief that the customers won't actually use them all. This is pretty common, and if you start to use MORE resources then anticipated the website may decide to remove you from the server. This has happened to TWS with a few hosts, that's why we moved to a dedicated server at The Planet. I honestly feel it's pointless for you to upgrade as you will still be on a shared server. You should consider a VPS or a dedicated server if you are worried about using all your bandwidth or any where close to it all.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that your design looks great! Nice job!

Thanks Jacob!

That really helps, although I'm slightly confused. Does that mean I don't have anywhere near 600GB? I don't think I'll be switching to a dedicated server unfortunately. What would you do?

Oh, by the way - do you think it would get featured in CSS Mania and a few others or am I dreaming? If it does, honestly, how many page views would I get?

Thanks,
Ed.

I know Karinne has been featured before, so what are her opinions?

I highly doubt you have anywhere near 600GB. It's probably more in the range of 15 - 20 GB...maybe a little more, maybe a little less. It just depends on how closely they monitor your bandwidth, and how many users they have on that server. I believe you will be just fine! I would just submit the site, upon completion, to all the CSS galleries, and see what happens. I believe you'll be surprised how far bandwidth goes.



I certainly feel it has the potential to be featured on many CSS gallerias. I noticed there were still a few "buggy bits" here and there, however, I assume that is because the site has not been finished. But, yes....it looks GREAT! I can only guess how many page views you would get, however, I can give you our stats....

TWS Monthly Unique Visitors: 46,399 (3 month average)
TWS Monthly Pageviews: 351,704.667 (3 month average)
TWS Monthly Bandwidth Usage: 39.623 GB (3 month average)

The highest TWS has ever used in bandwidth during a 1 month period was 82.325 GB of bandwidth. I would estimate that your bandwidth usage would be in the neighborhood of 15-20 GB, and your page views in the neighborhood of 200,000. (Opening Month Average) That estimate was in the high range, I can't really anticipate your opening month going above that, just from being featured in CSS galleries....unless you are doing some "other" form of marketing.

I would suggest you just monitor your site closely over that month and should you go above 20GB of bandwidth be looking for another host. I know that HostGator, MediaTemple, and Site5 shared plans ask you to either upgrade to a dedicated server or VPS, or find another host after exceeding the range of 20GB of bandwidth usage. That happened to us, apparently we were using to many CPU Cycles. We ended up with a fully dedicated server at The Planet.

You might want to look into getting a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Not only do you get full control of your partition, but you actually get what you pay for. Plus, there are less people on the server, normally 5-10. We used The New York NOC, and I have nothing bad to say about them. However, we moved on after 1 month, due to down time. (I think it was just a bad month for them, although, we couldn't take the chance at that time.)

Good Luck!

You'll only need it when you hit the frontpage of digg.. I wouldn't worry too much about the css galleries..

The site is renamed now.

Just a bit of statistics you might be interested in:

My portfolio site (http://www.alundavey.com/) is currently being showcased on CSS Mania, CSS Divine, Most Inspired, Design Snack, Full Single, Screenalicious, One Page Love and a few other miscellaneous showcase sites.

In the past 3 days I've used almost 1 GB in bandwidth and had over 1,100 unique hits (1,200 hits total). The total size of my site is roughly 984 kilobytes.

I've actually been listed on a couple of the above sites for over 3 weeks, it wasn't until my site appeared on CSS Mania (3 days ago) that things suddenly sped up. Since appearing on there I seem to have been automatically added to a ton of other showcase sites as well, which brings in quite a bit of extra traffic as well.

If I assume that my site will continue to get the same amount of visitors/traffic for the next month (I highly doubt it) then I will hit the 10 GB bandwidth mark and have had around 11,000 unique hits.

This is the first time I've submitted to showcase sites and I feel I did quite well considering my portfolio is only one page and contains only a few items. I don't know what you site looks like or anything, but I doubt many people could go over a 600GB bandwidth limit by just being featured on a couple of CSS showcase site.

Cheers, 4lun

This post has been edited by 4lun: Sep 16 2008, 03:08 PM

It will die down ... trust me Been there, done that

You'll be fine with your 600GB of bandwidth I doubt you'll need more than 1 or 2 GB and after a week (or two) it dies down considerably.