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MikeN
Asked: 2009-07-14 14:02:38 +0800 CST

How can I convert between a web hosting burstable MBPS bandwidth Vs. a fixed # of users connection?

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I just got a price quote from a VPS hosting company that told me my Virtual Private Server could host 10 simultaneous user connections at once. What would this correlate to in terms of burstable bandwidth (Megabits per second) that other companies quote? How could I convert between the two?

I could do a back of the envelope calculation:
1 page = 64 Kilobytes = 524288 bits
2 MBPS burstable bandwidth

So my effective simultaneous users per second with 2MBPS burstable bandwidth would be:

2E6 / 524288 =~ 3 users per second?

Is this a sane analysis? I'm assuming that once a connection with a client is established it is given priority until it is completed.

user-management bandwidth

3 Answers

  1. That's odd. I've never seen something like that where a VPS company limits you per connections (and I work in the web hosting industry).

    Also, providing 2mbps burstable is terrible, I am sure you'll find plenty of better companies than this, that don't limit the amount of connections and have much higher network capacity than 2MBPS.

    Also, it's hard to make a relationship between the speed of the server and simultaneous connections. We have now people that are running FiOS everywhere that download with speeds up to 15Mbps. Good luck working with a 2mbps burstable limit.

    Also, if you're working with a VPS, I strongly recommend using Xen instead of OpenVZ, you'll thank me later. Xen disallows hosts to oversell their nodes and has the perfect real example of a virtual server, where OpenVZ is almost a jailshell that can be oversold, therefore could turn out awfully slow. You can't load your own kernel modules into OpenVZ while you can with Xen.

    (BTW, OpenVZ is the open-source equivalent of Virtuozzo)

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  2. The problem with your analysis is that you're making an assumption on their burstable rate, and your users/second is almost entirely based on this BIG assumption. The company should be able to provide this information ... 2 MBPS seems REALLY slow. Years ago I had a shared account that could burst up to 100 MBPS.

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  3. It's an impossible conversion without more info. You need to ask them what the client MBPS limit is.

    How much are they charging a month? Just get an Amazon EC virtual server.

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