NOTE: THIS PAGE IS A COPY OF AN OLD WEB PAGE UP ON THE INTERNET. DRAAC.COM DID NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE NOR IS RESPONSIBLE FOR IT'S CONTENTS.

The Bandwidth Trap

By Timothy Ellis - April 1997

This page is my personal opinion of how the Web works and the dangers the unwary face in trying to use it.

It has become increasingly amazing to me that so many of the web space providers on the net sell web sites according to the amount of space they allow you to use.

The reality is though, that web space occupied is largely irelevant because the true nature of the web is that BANDWIDTH is what is actually charged for.

Why ? Because using only 1% or less of your available web space, can still exceed your bandwidth limits. Most sites have limititations. I find they are usually very badly advertised, in the fine print of your agreement, in the documentation you dont see until after you have paid up, or on some web page you never even get told about but are expected to have found, read and agreed to.

The sad fact is that bandwidth rules the web and if you dont know what it is and how it works, then you could suddenly find yourself with a bill for thousands of dollars and be left wondering what happened ?

"Rubbish, I dont believe it", I hear you say. I've said it myself. But it is true and it does happen far too regularly because few people understand what bandwidth is and the service providers dont care if you know or not, so long as you pay up. <cynical, I know - but the only attitude I've found to date.>

So what is bandwidth ?

Essentially, bandwidth is how many bytes that leave your web site in a specific period of time.

Unfortunately, not all service providers use the same definitions to measure and charge bandwidth. Some call it "hits" and measure it in their own way.

But I think the safest definition is to use bytes, and a good service provider will give you a report of exactly how many bytes your site is sending out. Many dont, particularly where you dont have your own domain.

Bandwidth has 3 components that form its calculation :

The equation looks like this :

Lets look at the components individually :

1. How many people come through your site.

Your provider may or may not be able to provide you with this figure. Many do not distinguish individual "people" hitting your site because they track traffic using their own pet formulas.

The easiest way to determine the approximate count is to use one of the web counters that are around. But these are only a guide, because if they are overloaded, they may not register every person hitting your page. Or they can be down. Or a likely one if you are in Australia using a US based counter is that the link is overloaded and no connection with the counter is made.

Preferable is a decent set of statistics, produced daily - but unless you have your own domain, its unlikely you will be able to get these.

It is essential to know about how many people access your site.

What makes things difficult is that you have no way of knowing how many times they access your site, as hit counters generally ignore re-hits. So if people go off to a link and then come back, or just reload the page, you wont know about it, but it does increase your bandwidth. Thats where actual statistics are much more precise, and much more useful to you.

2. How many bytes you allow each person to access.

Your site may have any number of htm files. Each directory would normally have an index.html (or .htm or both). You may then link down to subdirectories or other htm files.

Each htm file may contain pictures in one form or another.

How many bytes you allow each person to access is the addition of the size of all the htm files and all the pictures etc. that they display.

Take a simple example of a site with just an index.htm file (10k) and 2 pictures (5k and 12k).

Each person who accesses the site will receive 10+5+12=27k bytes.

Not much you may think, but as will become clear further down, very very important.

Where your site has multiple paths that people could follow, estimating this figure becomes a matter of the worst case being a user sees everything. They may not, or may see only an infinitely variable amount. You cant tell, but you have to guess.

3. The measuring period within your charging time frame.

Charging Time frames are usually a calendar month.

Measuring periods can be anything, but would normally be a single 24 hour day. Which means that the charging period would contain 28 to 31 measuring periods.

Now lets put it together and see where the problem lies.

Lets take the example of an often seen web package. You get 25 mb of space (with all the trimmings) and 600mb of bandwidth per month.

So, your charging period is a month - say 31 measuring periods of a day each.

You put together the page we used above - 10k index.htm and 2 pictures 5k and 12k for a total of 27k bytes. Considerably less than 1% of your space.

After advertising your page in the major search engines you check your traffic, as shown on your webcounter or reports. Lets take 4 different amounts here for comparison purposes. Say 10, 100, 500 and 1000 people per day. We will also assume for this exercise that each person through only accessed the site once, with no reloads. We also assume a 31 day month.

The equation again is : Visits X bytes X measuring period = Bandwidth in your charging period.

Remember we have a limit of 600mb or 614,400k per month.

Example 1 :

Example 2 : Lets do it again but double the page size to 50k. (Htm plus pics)

Example 3 : And again but with a decent more real sized site using 500k or about half a meg.

The breakeven points work out like this :

So, as you can see, the more you allow people to see, the less people can see it before you start running out of bandwidth.

Now here's the crunch part.

For each megabyte of bandwidth that you go over your limit, you get charged an extra fee. This varies from provider to provider. I've seen anywhere from $1 a meg to $5 a meg.

Lets assume we are with a cheap provider who charges us only $1 per meg.

So, with our examples above :

And to put this into its proper perspective, what were you paying for that 25 megs of space ? $50 a month is a common amount for 25 megs these days.

So what does exceeding your bandwidth limit do to the price of your webspace ? It can start off by doubling it, and then the sky is the limit.

And we have only used 500k of your 25 megabytes of space ! What will happen if you allow everyone access to a lot more ? I shudder to think !

"But hang on, I'm not going to get that many people through, am I ?"

Are You ? Can you really be that sure ?

No, you cant be that sure. The nature of the web includes being unable to control the number of people who access your site.

Most people spend a lot of time advertising their sites, trying to increase the number of people who visit. But what can you do when you are getting too many ? If you find an answer, I'd like to know too.

There are many ways in which your site can attract too much traffic. It can simply be a popular subject, a site that many people decide to put links on their own pages to, or you get featured in one of the "site of the day/week/year" sites or on some other high volume site.

Or you can either be a sex related site or use the inference of sex to bring people into your site. If you do the latter, then you deserve all the problems you get !

Speaking of which, any site that contains nudity of any form, from art to xxx material, will receive an extremely high number of visitors. 1000 people a day is actually a small volume to such sites. If you are planning on building such a site, BEWARE. Do your sums thoughly before you sign up. Make sure you overestimate your bandwidth needs, and then get even more !

As a side issue, the vast majority of web providers these days will not allow adult sites, precisely because of the high traffic they generate. So before you start one, you had better find out if your provider allows them. Better still, dont sign up without knowing what you can and cant do with your web space. Beware a provider who doesnt have any restrictions at all - they obviously havent thought things through properly, and are in for one hell of a shock the first time someone sets up an adult site on their system. If its you, you can expect a very nasty email when they figure out where their problem is, and a sizeable bill as well. Such providers will change the rules immediately and then try to enforce them on you restrospectively.

And there is of course, malicious traffic. If someone didnt like you, or decided that you had a great site that they thought they could charge people to enter, they could start feeding you a massive amount of traffic that you had not bargained for.

This is another reason for having decent statistics. You must be able to see exactly where all your visitors are coming from. If you dont have this, you cannot take action to shut down a site that is doing you harm. (One trick is to link back to their site, bypassing their front-end page).

Which brings me to my :

Recommendations for surviving the web :

You must have Statistics

- Daily bytes accessed summary - gives you an overview of the total bytes accessed each day.

- Daily page accesses report - summarises the access to each htm page on your site, so you can see exactly where your traffic is occuring.

- Daily "where from" report - shows you the url of where each person came from to access each page on your site.

Your statistics must be working BEFORE you use your site.

If no limitations are specified, find out what they are before you sign up. No traffic restrictions usually implies a nudity prohibition. Allowed nudity would normally have specific bandwidth limitations. If there are no restrictions, find out why.

Estimate your potential bandwidth usage BEFORE you sign up. Do your homework, ask around, ask your provider.

Above all else, AVOID THE BANDWIDTH TRAP !

For those of you who may be planning an adult site,

heres a bit extra to help you.

Most adult sites have 2 parts. The front end that shows off what you have and entices people into signing up with you. And the main section that has your main files for the exclusive viewing of your members.

Lets assume you set up a small index.htm file using 50k as your front end.

We will also assume that you quickly attract a modest traffic of 1000 people a day.

Thats 50k X 1000 X 31 = 1,550,000 or roughly 1.5 gigabytes per month.

And that is just for the people who havent signed up yet !

Now, how many people are you going to sign up a month ? 10, 50, 100 ? How many bytes of files will you give them access to ? 10mb, 25mb, 50mb - more ?

I believe that it is reasonable to assume that each new member will view close to your entire site within the first month. So if you have 25mb of site, and sign up 50 people a month, you need another 1.25 gigs a month to support your members.

1.5 + 1.25 = 2.75 gigabytes a month in needed bandwidth. And that assumes the members you signed up last month dont come back again this month for another look, and you dont attract an increasingly larger number of people to the site!

So what do I recommend ?

Forget about how many megs of space are offered. You will need 3 to 5 gigabytes of bandwidth a month to allow you to give access to 25mb of files/pictures/whatever. And you need to be able to expand on that without paying any new setup fees each time.

If you find a good provider of that level of bandwidth for a reasonable charge, let me know - my celebrity nudes site is currently without a home until I find one.

Beware of so-called "No Domain Specials" - What I've seen of them is they are nothing but a way of sucking the unwary into taking sites with insufficient bandwidth, so that the provider can then presure you into taking what you should have taken to start with but thought you couldnt afford. With a new setup fee, every time you upgrade.

NOTE: THIS PAGE IS A COPY OF AN OLD WEB PAGE UP ON THE INTERNET. DRAAC.COM DID NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE NOR IS RESPONSIBLE FOR IT'S CONTENTS.