Bandwidth

I've noticed a lot of talk lately about the costs of bandwidth. For example, the reason for no chat room? Increased bandwidth costs. The reason for no general purpose forum? Increased bandwidth costs. And it goes on.

I was just concerned about this because it really should not cost much at all. Are you guys being ripped off?

I have run many websites from the one server, the smallest that I can compare to this site is one of them that is a forum with over 10,000 members and many posts, and it doesn't use much bandwidth at all ( www.psp-forum.com ). Bandwidth costs about 10 US dollars per month for 70 gigabytes, it would be hard to use up all that with just a site and forum offering no large downloads.

Another one has over 20,000 members and over 1 million posts ( forum.juicyduff.com/ ), hundreds of times larger than this site and is one of the largest forums around. Sure it uses more bandwidth, but nothing that costs much more per month. And thats including a large image gallery.

You can get over 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month with many quality hosting services for less than $10 or $20 per month. That includes around 2GB of space and as many SQL databases etc as you like. I highly doubt a site like this uses 100GB of bandwidth per month. I would estimate maybe 1 or 2 at most.

Sorry if you already know all of that. I just got confused reading about the bandwidth problems, because it's the only time I've ever come across this problem, and I've been involved in web development for many years creating sites for many high profile people. Unless you somehow use something like 50GB of bandwidth per month from activities outside of the forum, then it's understandable. Just don't get ripped off!

Just to clarify, the lack of general forum is not just a bandwidth thing. It's because a lot of people don't want these boards to start spamming them with non-astronomy stuff. There are loads of general-purpose boards out there already, no need to add more.

We go through over 50G of bandwidth a month. We're not being ripped off, we just have fairly large requirements on a small budget. We use Hosting365 because they are a reputable Irish company. Yes, it's possible to get cheaper hosting but not of a higher quality and not in Ireland. I've had my fill of having to deal with American hosting companies at office times that don't suit etc.. At least with H365 they are literally just a few miles down the road, I've been in their data centre and they are easy to get on the phone when I need them.

I've been down the bargain-basement hosting router before and gotten right-royal bitten in the a**.

Bart.

50gb a month? Wow! Is that all from the forum? My sites go through maybe 5 or 6 GB a month and thats with over 10,000 unique visitors a day. Im not talking about any old bargain host either. Reputable of course. I just lost a domain due to Registerlfy going bust, I tend to avoid the less reputable companies now. I just didn't think it was possible for a forum like this to go through anything more than 2GB or so unless something really unoptimised is going on

50gb a month? Wow! Is that all from the forum? My sites go through maybe 5 or 6 GB a month

The forums and the rest of the site yea. Google seems to like us and seems to rate our threads quite highly on it's searches so we tend to get indexed a lot and get a lot of traffic. It will only grow. I was involved with a college bulletin board in my youth that used to charge it's way through 130GB or so a month. You'd be surprised how much traffic a busy board can generate.

Bart.

50gb a month? Wow! Is that all from the forum? My sites go through maybe 5 or 6 GB a month

The forums and the rest of the site yea. Google seems to like us and seems to rate our threads quite highly on it's searches so we tend to get indexed a lot and get a lot of traffic. It will only grow. I was involved with a college bulletin board in my youth that used to charge it's way through 130GB or so a month. You'd be surprised how much traffic a busy board can generate.

Bart.

Well like I showed in my post, I have built a forum that currently has over one million posts under its belt. And it would never reach anything near 50GB a month (although there are of course spikes of popularity). Thats were my confusion is coming from. Unless you mean REALLY busy. I'm talking just between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors a day (and god knows how many hits).

It doesn't come down to unique hits, it comes to down to actual page views. We have a lot of publicly visible threads which get viewed and indexed a lot. PhpBB is not the most efficient board in the world but it's not that inefficient. Our bandwidth usage is in line with what I'd expect based on past experience with other boards.

Bart.