How much bandwidth do you use?

[zoombapup]

I'm curious as to people's bandwidth usages. I'm looking to get a reliable host with an account thats going to be cheap initially but scalable in the longer term. I'm just wondering how much bandwidth people are using, for example on:

1) A reasonbly popular blog site
2) A reasonbly popular forum site
3) A resonably popular portal site

Anyone care to bandy some figures?

[Matthew]

Fun-Motion eats around 200-300GB a month, but most of that is the Flash video files. I can't imagine a forum or something text-based would eat much at all. The new Flashbang site is an affiliate casual games site. We don't host any downloads, just images and text. It weighed in at 50 GB last month, but I wouldn't consider it to be "popular".

[michalczyk]

A "reasonably popular" is relative. My sites (below) use combined about 20GB of monthly traffic. I have a lot of images there though. I don't think my sites are popular in any way - I get about 2000 visitors daily.

Assuming they all have equal amounts of traffic: a blog and forum is mainly text so they should not eat much compared to a portal which hosts games - could quickly eat up a lot of bandwidth.

[oNyx]

A big forum doesn't create that much traffic. With about 20k registered users we had only a handfull of gb per day iirc (half of it was spent on crap markup haha). The real issue was the cpu usage tho. Therefore we (I wasn't responsible for the technical side) had to upgrade the hardware several times.

>scalable in the longer term

Don't worry about meaningless things. You will have to move one day for some reason anyways. So, try to find something cheap first where you have the option to upgrade quickly if necessary and where you have the option to cancel it quickly if necessary (eg if you want to move over to a dedicated server from another hoster).

[Nexic]

I use about 60GB/Month, over 80% is game downloads. Sitting at 2.5k uniques per day.

[zoombapup]

thanks guys, I guess between 60 and 80gig transfer should cover it for now at least.

I will probably go with liquidweb for it, given the recommendations from people I know who host games sites on there.

[TunaBreeze]

If you keep the number of images to a minimum a smaller amount of bandwidth can go a long way. Really all depends on your content, smart development can save quite a bit of money.

[Escapee]

I use about 60 GB/month with a unique visits of ~5 K per day for one of my sites.

[Backov]

Keep in mind that 60-80gb/month is ~1/4th of 1mbps. Even with a dedicated server 1mbps should only cost you around $200/month. If you're paying anywhere near that rate/gigabyte with shared hosting you're paying way too much.