Re: [cobalt-users] Bandwidth Settings

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Werby wrote:

> I expect that you're asking because you are allowing 6 GB / month of traffic
> for a particular hosting package.  Since no real world hosting customer uses
> a constant amount of traffic across every second of every month it's not
> really appropriate to limit a customer under this hosting package to 20.81
> kb/s since in effect it will be impossible for the customer to come close to
> 6 GB / month.

And then there's the issue that even one visitor with a 56k modem will
experience such slow times that s/he'll never be back to the site again.

The absolute slowest bandwidth one should consider would be 128kbs; that
allows reasonable yet limited access to a site.

In fact a lot of the us$100/month and sub-us$100/month colocation and
RaQ-renting companies limit bandwidth to 128kbs.  (We shape traffice to
5mbs for our colocation/RentaRaQ offerings <smile>.)

> You should probably use a separate mechanism for tracking and
> accounting for traffic used.

Absolutely.  Mrtg, reading details from a router, would be nice, but
would be limited to per-IP reporting (which is also a limit of the
Cobalt bandwidth-limitation feature).  However we don't all have the
luxury of our own router.  So most of us are stuck with logs.

> If you want to limit the throughput then you
> should probably limit the throughput to a multiple of the sustained
> throughput rate that would be needed to max out at 6 GB / month.  If you
> already knew that my apologies - I thought someone reading may benefit from
> me pointing this out.

As I said, I'd never use less than 128kbs; even then if one customer has
a DSL connection he's going to feel it in his downloads.

We'd only limit customers who're using so much bandwidth our entire
network is affected (and on our network that's hard to do <smile>).

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 778-9980  *  fax: (702) 548-9484