Somewhat off-topic, but trying to get a feel for bandwidth requirements on a web-hosting service. You see anywhere from a couple of gigs on up for a given rate. Also heard horror stories of people thinking "X Gigs are enough" and getting hit with massive bills and/or being cut off when they exceeded. Could some of you web-masters out there give me an idea? Thanks!

I've seen 4 meg free stuff items hit over 1000 downloads in 2 days...do the math heh. It adds up quickly ~EA

I don't worry much about it here at the school - we got an OC-12 with no limits, and a sort of symbiotic relationship ahs developed out of it - my students get traffic and data to analyze, and artists here get unlimited bandwidth and storage space. :) My colocator was a different story... when it was just Serverpro (costing the school about $10.99/mo for 3.5GB bandwidth) and no back-end here, I blew out our monthly allotment in the first 24 hours after loading the Atrium set in Free Stuff; they charge $4.99 for each GB you go over (which isn't too awful bad, unless your stuff is really popular...) When it comes to bandwidth, "X Gigs" are never enough sometimes :) /P

I spread my freebies over two providers... AT&T (60 megs free with dialup account) & bizland.com (70megs $5.95/month) & in the 2 years I've been doing freebies I have yet to hit a bandwidth ceiling with either provider despite having in excess of 55,000 downloads so far. My traffic analysis shows that I use approx 2-3GB of bandwidth per month with the average file size just below 1 meg each

Morph World is hitting the 25 gigs/month level. Bout time to upgrade my hosting plan ;)

Chemicals Studios runs in excess of 20gig a month, I just recently got penalized by my domain host and was charged $20 for each gig I went over, Im currently searching for yet a new host. Hiya Trav:) Ken

Ken: check out Communitech.net (my host) I highly reccomend them!

Thanks for all the feedback, very helpful. John.

I was gonna ask the same question - I'm thinking about opening a site, but wondered just how much bandwidth folks use. Goldfire

Well, answer this: Let's say you have a webpage and expect 100 visitors a day. And each visitor downloaded a 1MB file from your site. What would be the bandwidth per month for this scenario? 100 * 1MB = 100 MB / day 1 month = 31 days = 31 * 100 MB = 3100 MB = 3.1 GB / month Not too bad, but if you get 200 visitors/day, it doubles to 6.2 GB / month, and that's just the download. You also have to add in all those jpgs and gifs, text, etc...