Just how much is 10GBs/month of bandwidth at TextDrive?

It’s a common question that I’m asked (and usually followed with why don’t you have shared plans with 200GB for a nickel like Dreamhost?).

Sharing some real data from a somewhat popular “weblog”:

Total Sessions 365,533.00
Total Pageviews 710,040.00
Total Hits 2,123,598.00
Total Bytes Transferred 7.88 GB
Average Sessions Per Day 11,791.39
Average Pageviews Per Day 22,904.52
Average Hits Per Day 68,503.16
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 260.25 MB

The two most popular pages are actually 37KB and 65KB on this site, but notice that the average page size then is 3.7KB.

This is because we get about 65-98% compression on each and every hit, combine that with Last-Modifieds and intelligent caching, and average page sizes (with mainly text) do generally come out at less then 5KB.

The main TextDrive page for example comes out in about one TCP packet (it’s 1.6KB) and then an example of what happens as a page get’s larger and larger, with more and more text would be this one, which is a 330KB page that’s served out as a 5.8KB compressed file. Not bad.

So how much is 10GBs? At least from the numbers above, it’s about 2.5 million hits a month, ~80,000 a day.

Where’s the 200GB a month nickel plan? You likely don’t need it, won’t use it and we’re simply honest.

·:· Posted 18 May 2005, 19:40 by Jason Hoffman to Answers  |  

  1. Yes. True for web pages but if someone wants to host podcasts or video files 10GB’s can go hella fast.

    That being said I still love textdrive.

    — Darryl    19 May 2005, 01:16    #
  2. Keep an eye out for our high bandwidth plans for podcasting and video. Coming real soon.

    — Jason Hoffman    19 May 2005, 03:28    #
  3. New plans sounds nice :)

    When I try some of my sites at pipeboost it says they are uncompressed, do I have to turn this on?

    — Ross Hill    19 May 2005, 11:59    #
  4. No, compression is on by default.

    — Jason Hoffman    19 May 2005, 17:00    #
  5. OK, how about an alternative need: Low Bandwidth, Low Hits, but Large Space – a low volume photo gallery, for instance. Granted, uploading alone would use up bandwidth, but over time I might need tens of gigs of storage but only serve up 500 MB-1 GB/month in bandwidth. Any plans coming up for that user?

    — Kevan    21 May 2005, 20:33    #
  6. Kevan: yep, we’re covering both bases, your’s is actually coming out first and is called strongspace

    — Jason Hoffman    22 May 2005, 06:30    #
  7. oooh, teaser, teaser! man, you guys are getting like 37signals… any chance of beta testing/VCxx style “getting in early”?

    — Kevan    24 May 2005, 22:53    #
  8. Nice new logo, BTW.

    — Kevan    24 May 2005, 22:54    #