Hello Friends,

I am thinking of hosting my web site on my own server. I live in the UK and one phone company offers a broadband connection with the following features:

Download speeds of up to 1Mbps.
Upload at speeds of up to 250Kbps.
4 direct Users and 10 indirect multiple user connections possible, which allows you to expand your business's access to the internet.
Up to 10 email addresses to use as a business tool.

How many such connections and or phone lines will I need to be able to properly serve 500 people connected to my web site simultaneously?
How about 1000 / 5000 simultaneous clients?

Thanx for your replies?

you'll be hard pressed to host websites on an asyncronous broadband connection. (meaning different speeds up and down). the purpose of these connections is for surfing, because of the higher download speeds. since you're going to be hosting sites/data. you're going to be doing alot more upload than download.

500 simultaneous users is pretty high. but there's no real way to calculate how much bandwidth you're going to need with that figure alone. what i recommend, is start off relatively small maybe 1-2 T1's with a company that offers bonded T's. you should then be able to scale up fairly easily from there. you just need to make sure that you're monitoring your current bandwidth usage consistantely so you know when you need to scale.

if you need more info, let me know.

Vestige thank you,

I need some more light though.
When you say: "1-2 T1's with a company that offers bonded T's" do you mean that I need to connect my server to a company's ethernet?
If yes should I choose a 10Mbps or 100 ethernet?
In that case, how many simultaneous clients will I be able to serve?
Asume that I own a Pentium 4 processor @ 2GHz server.

not exactly

you would get one or two T1's through a provider. (like at&t, sprint, etc).

what do you mean connect to a company's ethernet? do you mean the company you work for? i guess you could do that, but i'm sure they'll notice that much bandwidth going through.

in any case, you always want to go 100 baseT

again, it would be very difficult to judge how many sites you could host, or simultaneous connections. are you doing win2k? or linux? are you hosting dynamic pages? db's? is that a dual or a single processor, how much ram? scsi or ide?

Here is the answer to your questions:

When I say company's ethernet I actually mean a co-locator.

For an OS, I am leaning towards linux.
I will be hosting dynamic pages.
The databases will be of a maximum of 200Gigs.
It is a dual processor.
2 Gigs of ram.
A fast SCSI.

Hope its more clear now.
Thanx again.

colocation is a very good option, i usually recommend it to people starting out. i would probably start off with 3mb with the colo provider (you should be able to go up from there as needed)

it sounds like you have a pretty decent server, definately go with linux. and you'll probably do fairly well for the amount of people you're trying to support.