I'm getting some excellent traffic these days. It's only 9 days into the month, but my Linode 1080 has already pumped out 45% of its monthly transfer allotment. At this rate, I'm likely to run out of transfer by the 20th.

What should I do?

1a) Upgrade?
1b) Buy extra transfer?
1c) Get another linode and pool the transfer?

But then I run the risk of buying more than I actually need. Suppose I'm in a stingy mood Besides, I don't really need an upgrade. The 1080 is already big enough for me, and I'm using only half the RAM and a quarter of the HDD. So what about...

2) Don't do anything, and let Linode bill me for the exact overage at the end of the month?

I think I read somewhere that the price per GB is the same no matter which option I take. Can somebody confirm this for me?

Thanks,

In this thread:

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/ Peter

Overage is $0.10/gb according to the FAQ. That means 600GB of overage would cost you $60, the same as signing up for another Linode 1080.

If I were you, I'd get another 1080 (or whatever) so the transfer can be pooled and use the second host as a development/test/failover server.

Hopefully you already have, but if not, you should seriously look into any type of http compression, javascript compression, reducing quality of images, or whatever else you can do to decrease your bandwidth usage.

Thanks for the link, I was looking for that. But seriously, yeah, that's the same price as an upgrade or another linode.

I believe I'm already using compression on everything I can, and a lot of things are also being cached, but there's a limit to what that can do when lighttpd status shows I'm serving 500+ requests per second (including quite a bit of dynamic content)

Awesome servers here, though -- unbelievable performance as always.

Just gotta ask. Is this a dramatic spike in traffic over recent months? Have you checked to make sure someone isn't leaching bandwidth from you?

Since overage/upgrade price is the same, I would do the following:

1) Simply pay overage, since you're not losing money compared to other options
2) Wait to see if you're requiring more bandwidth on a sustained basis
3) If you are, then upgrade to the next higher linode that your bandwidth usage is over.

So if you're regularly using 1000GB/mth, the Linode 1440 with 200GB overage would make the most sense.

Even if you don't *need* the extra RAM, it does provide benefits due to caching, and it's a free upgrade if you're already using the bandwidth.

You can also think about moving all the static content (javascript, images, stylesheets etc) to Amazon S3 (and CloudFront).

Unless I am thinking incorrectly, using S3 would cost more than paying the overages. S3 and Cloudfront are $.18 per GB transferred out.

Guspaz's solution seems the most reasonable. Thanks.

And yes, it's really interesting that bandwidth is cheaper here at Linode than with S3. Linode rocks! Who needs S3?

(Storage, of course, is a lot cheaper with S3, but where there's a lot of storage, there also tend to be a lot of transfer... unless you're only using it for backup purposes, that is.)

$0.17 per GB, but your point holds; S3's data transfer costs are higher than Linode's.

SimpleCDN's offerings are 3.4 to 7.9 cents per gig (depending on which of their three products you use), so that's cheaper.

Of course, the simplest solution is to just use Linode for bandwidth if you're not that desperate to save money.

I've used a few CDNs, they are certainly worthwhile if you are doing tons of traffic, however for anything under a few TB it's just as easy to use Linode, either upgrade to a bigger one or get another one and split the load.

True, it's certainly easier to use Linode, but say you're using 2TB of traffic each month, and are comfortable with a 540MB Linode (which should be enough for anything but extremely large or complex web traffic):

Linode alone:

Base cost: $30
Additional cost to get 2TB at Linode: $130 (2880) + $40 (+400GB)
Total cost: $200/mth

Linode + SimpleCDN (simple mirroring):

Base cost: $30
CDN cost for 1700GB: $66.30 (1700*0.039)
Total cost: $96.30/mth

So if you needed 2TB of bandwidth and fit comfortably in a 540MB Linode, you'd cut your cost in *half*, quite a large savings. There's some extra effort involved to set up your DNS to get it working, but it's simple edge caching so there's no management.

I'm simplifying the scenario a bit, I suspect. In reality it's not possible to so precisely control bandwidth usage that you use exactly 100% of your Linode's bandwidth and put 100% of the remained onto the CDN. But the general idea holds.