1.5Mbs

[thebillionaire]

Im thinking of buying the vps from rackforce, until my earnings become stable and I can afford a good dedicated server. But what I dont understand is that what does 1.5Mbs bandwidth mean? So will I be getting 760 GB bandwidth a month? is there a daily cap?

[AndyH]

It means you are capped at 1.5Mbs (megabits - not bytes) at the port.

That's it, not capped daily, hourly or anything else.

[thebillionaire]

so the bandwidth is good, but the speed will limit the amount downloaded right? is 1.5Mbs good, ok or bad?

[r2d2]

1.5mbps seems pretty low to me.

What type of sites are you planning on using the server for? Would reseller not be a better option? My $20 reseller account has a 10mbps connection.

[Masetek]

My home connection has 1.5mpbs upstream. I wouldn't think this would be fast enough for a webserver?

[thebillionaire]

Chris what do you think? its a 1.5mbs for ur site alone, with shared/resellers the connection speed is divided

[Westech]

I'm not Chris, but I'll tell you what I think. I think that a limit of 1.5mbps would be ok for a lightweight content site with moderate traffic, but not for a site with large page sizes like an online games or videos site. When Rackspace says "unmetered 1.5 mbps connection," they mean that you can't be charged for bandwidth overages, but your connection speed is limited to a maximum of 1.5 megabits per second.

If your site ever needs to send out more than 1.5mbps (during peak traffic times for instance) everything will slow down to a crawl. If you have a site with high page sizes, such as an online games site or a videos site then this will be especially limiting for you.

To get a very rough idea of whether 1.5 mbps would work for your site, we can do some math:

1.5 megabits per second = 0.1875 megabytes per second
0.1875 megabytes per second * 60 seconds = 11.25 megabytes per minute.

This means that the maximum amount of website data that a server capped at 1.5mbps can transfer in 1 minute is 11.25 megabytes (which is equal to 11,520 KB). It's actually a little less than this due to overhead from http headers, TCP/IP connection management, and any other services your server is running such as DNS, etc. but we're just looking for a rough estimate so we'll stick with 11,520 KB.

Now, figure out the average size of one page of your site, including all html files, pictures, flash, etc included in your average page. If you have a very basic content site with just some html and a few small pictures in each page, you might have an average page size of around 22 KB (2 KB html file + 2 x 10 KB images). If you have a media site such as an online games site you might have an average page size of around 5022 KB (2 KB html file + 2 x 10 KB images + 5000 KB flash or video file.)

So, for the lightweight content site: 11,520 KB max per minute / 22 KB per page = a maximum of around 524 pages per minute - probably fine for most sites with moderate traffic.

For the high-bandwidth site: 11,520 KB max per minute / 5022 KB per page = a maximum of around 3 pages per minute. Not so good even for a site with relatively low traffic. This means that if more than 3 pages are requested per minute the site will slow down or become unreachable.

If you want to run these numbers for your specific site just substitute in your average page size for the examples I used above. You could also switch out the mbps values to get a rough idea of what a 10mbps or a 100mbps connection could do.

Also, Google is very useful for converting between MB, KB, Mb, etc. You can type in a query such as 23 MB in KB and Google will do the conversions and math for you.

[thebillionaire]

alright thanks