If your a developer you are familiar with the term “Bandwidth” in some for or another.  In essence bandwidth is the amount of data you serve to people usually calculated in MB or TB / month.  A website like Craigslist.org even though it has a lot of users is able to keep its bandwidth down because of the limited interface and over-optimzed 300px images for to estimate the value of your next rental apartment / erotic service.   However a website with less traffic and a heavy graphical or file downloading interface  can send bandwidth through the roof.

There are many solutions to this debate that I have learned and tested out over the years. I am going to offer a solution that I came up with and present my findings. The website I will use to present this example is http://fauxfire.com, which around x-mas can have 100,000 visitors a week, many of which will stream upwards of 40mb of music as they enjoy the fire.

A major online company with large storage needs or wanting to take media serving demands off there main box, has been more and more likely to adoption to cloud solutions.  Amazon S3, will let you upload unlimited amounts of photos/files/music, and only pay for it when they are needed.  The load of serving the files, usually static files uploaded by users, is taken off your application server. Seeming like a good idea for my music, I uploaded all of the audio tracks, and flv for the fire to an amazon S3 bucket.  I checked my account a week later, and with only 10,000 visitors I already owed amazon $285.   Ughh oh.. come Christmas, those can easily be $2500.00 days.. That is not going to work.  Now keep in mind each visitor is taking close to 50mb of traffic. If you have a simple site, your bills in no way would be that high.  What I am trying to illustrate however is the cost of transfer on s3 is indeed high, and will grow in parallel based on your traffic for a heavy web application.

So now what?  I cant afford to give away the fire.  The songs are optimized as much as possible.  The next thought for many is a dedicated powerful server.  Even so, you have to watch your ceilings.. most dedicated servers have a 500gig bandwidth limit as well.

Thinking simple, I have a godaddy unlimited account for a few applications.  They claim “unlimited bandwidth” so.. Lets see if they can pull through.

This is a report from last week. Almost 1 TB, in 6 days..  This would have cost nearly $600 from amazon S3, and this shared go-daddy basic server cost me around $9.00 a month ($14 usually but you can find promo code, and buy for 12 months.) I called go daddy, and told them my fire was going to be on TV, and I was expecting a slam of traffic and alot of bandwidth, and asked if there was a hidden limit to the “unlimited” account, and the man said. Hmm let me check.. Break.. Nah.. Yer good.

So so far so good.  The new go daddy shared system is grid based. In the older days, your shared server meat you and around 1,200 other people share a single box.  If I had a neighbor they would be angry, and with this amount of traffic may run out of resources quickly. These days, you share a grid of servers, so 12,000 may share access to a 10 server grid.  meaning for $9.00 a month you really have access to huge range of resources if you need it.

In no way will this work for everyone but for me it was simple and has saved me thousands.  I am sure if the fire runs at this rate for too long go daddy will decide it not worth it for me to be a customer.  But until then I recommend a basic shared structure for file hosting, and not to get to ahead of yourself if you don’t need to.