colocation wants minimum of 1 MBit transfer

Question

if a colocation company wants you commit to at least 1 MBit transfer, I'm curious what that translates to monthly assuming one maxes out on the 1 mbit.

any general rule of thumbs in terms of how many Amps to get?

Answer 1

If you run a 1MBit connection continually maxed out, you can get about:

730.5*3600/8 = 328725 ~= 328GB

per month down that channel.

HOWEVER, there is almost no chance that you'll consistently use exactly that much bandwidth throughout a month, even if you're doing something fairly consistent, traffic wise (spamming, off-site backups, etc) -- you'll still have dips and troughs. For web traffic, a 4:1 peak:average ratio is my standard ratio.

In my experience, these days it works out cheaper to buy a data allocation rather than a fixed-width pipe, as by the time you apply peak ratios and buy an appropriately sized pipe it's more expensive than just buying the data. The only time I wouldn't do that is if I was working for someone with an absolutely fixed connectivity budget, where sticking to the numbers was far more important than good performance. I'd also be looking for a new client to work for.

As far as power goes, (and this is a completely separate question that should have been asked as such) that is dependent on the equipment you're installing. There's any number of previous questions here on serverfault dealing with that issue.

Answer 2

I think 1Mbps works out to around 2.5Tb per month. But you need to be careful how it is billed b/c being charged for TOTAL data transferred is very different from 95th percentile billing.

As far as amps, I would check the specs of the hardware you plan on using.