All this talk about Amazon EC2 and bandwidth

Let me share some perspective on what bandwidth numbers actually mean… Because talking about 1000Gb is a term that doesnt actually connect with anything in people minds

1000Gb/month means that on a 31 day month you are sending out (numbers rated as 1000 equals 1k because thats prevalent)

  • 373Kbytes per second…
  • 22Mbytes per minute
  • 1.3Gbytes per hour
  • 32Gbytes per day

or the ability to

  • broadcast a 256bkit audio stream to 11.5 users around the clock
    (remember 8 bits == 1 byte)
  • send out over 1,500 CDROM images
  • send out over 200 DVD images (single sided)
  • send out almost 286,000 MP3’s (3.5Mb each)

In otherwords… its a lot of bandwidth… assuming i’m not so tired that my numbers are flawed (which is very possible)

so… at EC2 to send out 5KB/sec for the same month would cost $2.68. 50KB @ $26.80. 500KB @ … well you get the idea.

One last comparison before I head off to bed… At EC2, for $160/month (comparable to a mid-level hosting provider), you get about 365Gb xfer per month… or 136KB/sec for the entire month (or 4 256Kbit audio streams, 547 CDs, 54 DVDs, 101,714 mp3’s, or one 365,000,000 letter text file ;))

2 thoughts on “All this talk about Amazon EC2 and bandwidth

  1. your off by a couple of digits in the textf file. your missing 3 zeros, give or take. 365GB = 365,000mb = 365,000,000 kb = 365,000,000,000 bytes (assuming 1mb =1000000 bytes, etc)…

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