What bandwidth costs?
Reading the news that Engadget has had over 10 million views in one day for their iPhone story, I was surprised to yet again see people talking about bandwidth costs like they actually mean anything. One blogger wrote that for him, “the bandwidth costs would be prohibitive“. It made me remember all those bloggers who still ask for donations to cover bandwidth costs for their blogs, which is, well, hilarious.
You know why? Because bandwidth is free. Especially for blogging purposes. If you have a complex rich multimedia application with millions of users and millions of visits per day, then bandwidth and hosting are serious matters.
But, if you have a blog, bandwidth is free. Here’s a simple example. In December, this blog has had around 100.000 unique visitors and 160.000 pageviews. I’m not going to advertise my hosting provider here, so I won’t name it, but I’ve got 1 TB of bandwidth included in my 20$ monthly hosting plan. For the aforementioned 160.000 pageviews, I have used about 25 GB of bandwidth (and that’s without any serious optimizations). I have had 999.999 GB left unused included in the plan. If I’ve had 1.600.000 pageviews, I would have used 250 GB. If I’ve had 10.600.000 visitors, I would have spent 2.5 TB of bandwidth. I’m not sure how much additional cost this would add to my bill, but I’m sure that with this amount of visitors I could easily overcome any overhead on the bill with a single text link ad placed anywhere on the site.
Now, server CPU time is another matter - when you have millions of visits in a day, you’re spending a lot of CPU time on your hosting provider’s server (if your hosting provider can take it in the first place). But even this can be overcome with simple caching (there’s a caching plugin for Wordpress called WP-Cache which solves this problem), and if you’ve chosen the right hosting provider the additional cost would probably not be that high (we’re talking a couple thousand dollars all in all, and Engadget makes a lot more than that on advertising).
99.999% of blogs will never reach Engadget’s traffic levels. The actual bandwidth your blog is using up - be it 1 GB/month or 100 GB/month isn’t important. The point of this post is that bandwidth costs and even other hosting-related costs scale very well with the possible blog income - even if you don’t plan to heavily monetize your blog. So, bloggers, if you’re still afraid of high bandwidth or think that high bandwidth usage will empty your pockets, you need to wake up and/or change your hosting provider, because bandwidth on a blog doesn’t cost a thing.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Of course you are writing from an different perspective, but perhaps I should point out that in some countries if a blogger wishes to host their content locally bandwith can be very expensive - that is the situation were I live in South Africa so I host my content in the US … but for those who want to keep those nice fast local connections …
not to say i’m not disagreeing with you
January 12th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I really don’t know what we pay or how much data we moved last Tuesday, but I got word that it was steady at over 6Gbps for only the images. Pretty nuts! People get pretty upset when we go down though, gotta do what’s necessary.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/142/339424827_b3d84f61df_o.jpg
That is my b/w usage for 24 hours. B/w is expensive when you’re getting a lot of traffic. Sure you use media temple that offers a TB of b/w which is oversold to hell. Some of us have dedicated servers with quality b/w that isn’t oversold.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:20 am
@kilps: Oh, definitely. If I were hosting locally, here in Croatia, the site would probably be dead on every Digg effect, and they would charge me $1000 extra for the overhead. I’m also hosting in the US.
@Ryan: that’s insane bandwidth, but then again, your site is a serious operation, I’m sure you guys know how to handle it (:. And yes, I’d be the first to get upset if the site was down, I visit Engadget every day, not only for the purposes of the blog but also for my work.
@Rub3X: Of course, but when you have a dedicated server you already know what you’re doing and you probably have a financial plan behind it. The point of my post was that some people are still afraid of bandwidth as if a couple thousand daily visitors extra can make your hosting bill go through the roof.
January 17th, 2007 at 8:20 am
So you are on Mediatemple? That is nothing to be ashamed of!
I did not know that they also had a CPU usage restriction, I thought only Dreamhost used a CPU time limit?
Unfortunately my own blog doesn’t get a lot of visitors so bandwith and CPU time restrictions are not an issue for me… at the moment!
January 17th, 2007 at 11:05 am
@Johan: they have GPU units, this means grid processor units. Basically it’s their way to measure the amount of load you put on their CPUs. If you go over a certain amount, you must pay extra. However, this site was features on Slashdot Digg in the last month and i didn’t reach that number.
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