Frequently asked questions

Bandwidth FAQ

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• How do I calculate bandwidth usage?
  
• How do you measure bandwidth?
  
• How do you read MRT Graphs?
  

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How do I calculate bandwidth usage?

To calculate your bandwidth use this simple formula:

-Total bandwidth usage (add incoming and outgoing together) x 324,000 = Data transfer per month.

For example, your average bandwidth usage is: 100 kilobits per sec according to your report

100,000 bytes x 324,000 = 32,400,000,000 bytes/roughly 32 Gigabytes of data transfer.

In determining your monthly transfer, the best figure to use is your daily or weekly average totals since these are the ones that are updated most frequently and take any significant spikes into account.

The great part of this report is that you will always know how much bandwidth your server is using at a glance.

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How do you measure bandwidth?

We offer state of the art MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Graph) Reporting Stats to accurately determine how much bandwidth is being used by each server on our network in real-time.

MRTG is able to chart and track any server's usage by taking a sample of how much bandwidth the server is using every 5 seconds. It then uses this data to calculate:

1. The maximum bandwidth usage of the server, the most bandwidth that the server has used in a given time period.
2. The average bandwidth usage of the server, based on the period and interval stated.
3. The current bandwidth usage, this is the usage that the server is doing as of its last reporting update (done every 5 minutes).

Four MRT graphs that are kept updated:

1. Daily (with the 5 minute average of your bandwidth usage gauged)
2. Weekly (with the 30 minute average of your bandwidth usage gauged.)
3. Monthly (with the 2 hour average of your bandwidth usage gauged.)
4. Yearly (with the 1 day average of your bandwidth usage gauged.)

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How do you read MRT Graphs?

The blue line on the graph indicates the outgoing bandwidth usage. This is the data transfer that your server is pushing out into the internet. This covers your web traffic, outgoing emails, outgoing file transfers and any other data that is being given by the server.

The green line indicates the incoming bandwidth usage. For the most part, incoming bandwidth on the server is incoming file requests (visitors' browsers requesting data from your website mainly), incoming email, and communicating network traffic, as well as incoming file transfers, such as when you FTP into your server to update your site's data etc.

You'll find that mostly your incoming transfer will be significantly lower than the data going out of your server. The simple reason for this is because most web servers give out much more data than they take in.

For an example of what MRTG Stats look like click link.

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