# bandwidth requirements for web server



## scottemick (Nov 11, 2010)

I currently have a web server hosted elsewhere, and I have numbers from awstats that I just installed against my old logs as far as total bandwidth used, but I don't know how to translate that to whether I need a 5mbps, 8mbps, 10 mbps, etc pipe.  This is what I have compiled using awstats:


```
Month 	Unique visitors 	Number of visits 	Pages 	Hits 	Bandwidth
Apr-10 	1,770,247 	2,613,702 	6,407,788 	31,087,933 	238.29 GB
May-10 	1,943,328 	2,816,135 	6,391,916 	33,313,455 	259.35 GB
Jun-10 	1,932,208 	2,761,142 	5,949,494 	31,624,680 	240.87 GB
Jul-10 	1,783,682 	2,610,862 	6,060,354 	31,625,293 	240.32 GB
Aug-10 	1,680,824 	2,483,752 	7,360,794 	33,812,307 	247.54 GB
Sep-10 	1,555,457 	2,313,376 	6,990,146 	32,306,955 	235.83 GB
Oct-10 	1,612,576 	2,428,246 	7,190,697 	30,752,460 	229.19 GB
Nov-10 	218,070 	278,118 	905,519 	3,963,398 	29.51 GB
Total 	13,790,113 	20,169,008 	51,839,417 	250,402,338 	1886.63 GB
```


If I just go by bandwidth and divide it out (also knowing that the average max is about 8 GB per day, that comes to 740.74 Kbps).  If I multiply that by a fudge factor of 2 or 3, I am coming up with 3 mbps max needed for our current capacity.  Does this make sense, or am I way under?

Any ideas welcome

Scott


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## gordon@ (Nov 13, 2010)

That sounds about right. I came up with around 850kb/s. 3Mb/s should be sufficient if you are happy with 3Mb/s as your maximum transfer rate.

You would likely be better off looking at a tool like net-mgmt/mrtg to help you graph your bandwidth usage on a 5 minute basis. Since the GB transferred per month doesn't account for usage spikes.


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## Alt (Nov 13, 2010)

Agree to gordon@
Bandwith can really vary, depending on what you have on your server. It can be video hosting or blog engine - they will give greatly different traffic. So measure speed on interface, not visitors count.


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## scottemick (Nov 13, 2010)

Thanks everyone, it is an ecommerce site, with pictures and products, but no video. I'm going to try that program that gordon mentioned and see what I get.


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## scottemick (Nov 14, 2010)

The mrtg program works great.  It was a pain for me to install on FreeBSD 6.2 Release, but now I have some realtime stats. I also installed it on my ubuntu web servers, it was far easier on those.  Thanks again


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