That almost certainly won't be enough for 10 people browsing your site at once, with 60kb pages, unfortunately.

It's a fairly simple matter of mathematics. Using Google's handy little conversion functions, one can deduce that your 512kiloBIT/second upstream speed (which is what really matters) is equivalent to 64 kiloBYTEs per second of download speed for the user. Considering that ISPs rarely, if ever, give you the full rated speed... round down to 60 kilobytes/second (under heavy load, this may drop even lower).

At that rate, you can produce one page per user per second. If you have ten users browsing at once, and all of them request a page at the same time, it could take up to ten seconds for your page to be served to all--and that, for most broadband users, is completely unacceptable unless your content is the best thing since sliced bread.

For hosting a website, especially with page sizes that large, you really need a T1 or T3 line. The download speed from such a connection might actually be WORSE than your current connection--but the upload speed will be far faster.

Whoops, almost forgot... Welcome to WW!

[edited by: WesleyC at 8:36 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2007]

Thanks for the quick reply!

We are running on business class service, so it is quite a but more reliable than residential service. Also we do not share our connection speeds, it's guaranteed bandwidth.

Ok so 512 would not be enough. We do have the option to upgrade our service though.

We can take it up to 1 meg upload for about $40 bucks more, up to 1.5 meg for $95 bucks more, and 2 meg for $350 more.

Would 1 meg or 1.5 megs work, or do you think we would have to spring for the 2 meg connection?

-Daniel

10 people simultaneously "on the web site" are unlikely to all hit the site at once. Consider the ratio of load time to reading time, and it's unlikely you will have more than 1-2 users requesting a page at once.

That said, even those 1-2 users are unlikely to be happy. My high-speed cable connection gives me 15mbit/sec down continuously and 30mbit/sec in bursts. Clearly, your site, limited to 512K, 1M, or even 2M, certainly isn't going to "snap" compared to other sites.

The service that you have is not designed for this. It's meant for your internal users primarily browsing. The up/down ratio is completely backwards to your needs for a web server. While their terms of service may permit you to run a web server on it, I wouldn't recommend it.

I would never recommend that anybody host a web site on an in-house server. It just doesn't make sense. You can rent a dedicated server with a ton of bandwidth for the price of much less bandwidth brought into your business.

The single connection from your business location to the ISP is a glaring potential point of failure. Somebody makes a mistake with a backhoe, or even a ladder, and you could be out of commission for days. Good data centers have multiple fat pipes coming into the building from different directions, so they can survive this. They also have 24/7 monitoring, redundant power and backup, etc.

For $100-$200/month, you can get multiple 1-gigabit connections to major backbone providers in a data center, AND rent the server to boot. If you really need to run on your own hardware, you can rent rack space and the connection for a bit less. Just make sure you buy hardware that has excellent remote managibility. (

With the right hardware, you can even do BIOS updates remotely. IBM and Dell are good at this. And if you need to remotely access the GUI, tried PCAnywhere and been disappointed, there are some much better solutions available.

This subject has come up numerous times here. I've never seen anything but a consensus recommending against it.