How much Bandwidth does simplemachines.org use a month?

[Acans]

I've been told by a few people (Motoko-chan  )  that theirs no such thing as unlimited space and bandwidth. So i would like to put a host ive found to the test, so that some time in the far distant future this "unlimited" doesn't come back to bite me in the [FORUM CENSOR].

[青山 素子]

I think we currently have 4mbit provisioned and are billed at 95th percentile, which is a billing practice common in colocation agreements. The provisioning information is a bit old, so I may be incorrect on that.

Remember that we don't rent dedicated servers. We own our own hardware and simply pay for space and bandwidth in a data center.

[Ricky.]

I think we currently have 4mbit provisioned and are billed at 95th percentile, which is a billing practice common in colocation agreements.

If you dont' mind, can you elaborate it a little more that what exactly 4mbit provisioned means.. and what is 95th percentile billing ?

Also somewhere I read that SMF has separate server for Mysql and PHP ?

[青山 素子]

If you do some searching, you should be able to find the diagram our server administrator posted. We actually have five servers that I know of. Two are for our web front-end, one is our database, one is our file server (holding the files that our webservers use), and another is for our mail and other tasks.

When you buy bandwidth in a data center, you don't buy it by the size of data transferring over it in a month, like many small hosting plans do. Instead, you pay for a line (usually called a drop) and a certain base speed for that line.

If you are familiar with small networks, you've probably heard of terms like 10/100, 10 mega bit, 100 mega bit. Those are speeds. This is how you get a line for co-located equipment. For example, you tell the data center you want a 4 megabit line. This means they charge you for 4 megabits of transfer, if you use it or not. Of course, you can always translate that into actual transfer if you really want. If you run a constant 4 megabit of transfer, that is about 1.3 terabytes a month in data transfered.

Now, most data centers will bill on 95th percentile. This is common because most lines are "burstable" meaning you can use more speed than you are paying for. It's a good thing if you sometimes get a spike in your traffic. The data center sees your usage level, then in billing orders the samples of your speed from highest to lowest and removes the top 5% of the samples. The highest value left is the speed you get billed for (if you went over the rate you paid as a base, or you get charged for the base if you are under it). There is a good description on this billing practice over at the Burstable billing Wikipedia article.

[NHWD]

how about creating a file hosting site