Is a 2.5meg upload speed sufficient for a web server hosting a single web site?

I want to host my web site at home and I can get a business adsl2 deal where the upload speed is 2.5meg.

I think this will be good enough for my site even if it becomes fairly popular. There will be photos on almost every page on the site. They will be no bigger than 128k. As a rough estimate the typical page will be between 20-140k (mostly because of the photos - of gardens and animals).

What do you think?

What upload speed would you like to have?

I'm just not sure if 2.5meg is sufficient to serve a website.

I want as fast an upload speed as possible but I also want to host the web site at home.

The best adsl2 deal I can get is 24meg download and 2.5 meg upload so I'm wondering if 2.5 meg is obviously useless for a web server or if it will actually do pretty well unless my site gets very popular (in which case I should be able to afford a T1 connection!)

Can anybody help me?

Does anybody know if 2.5meg upload is good enough for a web server? Doesn anybody have any ideas whether it would slow to a crawl?

Gaznewt - You can check your bandwidth stats on weekly basis and know how much is the bandwidth eat-up by the visitors and from that stats you can decide later whether you want to increase your bandwidth.
As of now i guess your site will be all right with that speed.

Originally Posted by GazNewt

Can anybody help me?

Does anybody know if 2.5meg upload is good enough for a web server? Doesn anybody have any ideas whether it would slow to a crawl?

there is enough speed/bandwidth. setup your server to be light, use fedora etc.

in fact, i seen few people attemp setup home server as web server. they failed. check the ISP restriction. and name server naming thing.

Thanks for the replies.

I'm going to go for this adsl2 deal with 2.5meg upload and host my website at home. The provider expectd people to use the server as a webserver, it's an "office" deal for £88 per month.

Now I need a server, windows server 2003 r2 and sql2005. Expensive stuff!

Good luck.

Use Windows and SQL 64 bit. Especially for Server 2003 it makes a very big difference, especially if you use SSL.

You're putting SQL Server on a different machine from IIS, right?

I don't want to shell out too much too soon, so I'm starting off with a single Windows 2003 Server Web Edition server with 2gig ram running IIS and Sql Server 2005 Express.

If it takes off and performance suffers then I will immediately get a second Sql 2005 server with Windows 2003 R2.

Does this sound like a sensible idea - or an obvious noobie mistake?!

If the 2.5 meg upload speed starts to be a bottleneck I will have to include google ads and an amazon shop to pay for a faster SDSL connection, assuming it will be available in my area by then

I will look into the 64bit editions of windows/sql and find out why it is a good idea.

WinServ 2003 x64 is the second fastest web server after Solaris 10 x64. For SSL, it's almost twice the speed of the 32 bit version. That's why it's a good thing.

What are you doing with SQL Server 2005? Or if you don't want to divulge your secrets, are you using it for transactional or warehousing? What's your volume of data, and how often do you query it? SQL Server could be compared to a virus - it's written to take over the host computer. It does a lot of aggressive optimization that other concurrent processes can interfere with. Now there are also some advantages - SQL and IIS will use shared memory instead of TCP/IP when on the same machine. But you might want to monitor their interaction.

depend on the server is using what kind of uplink port.. the common one is 10mbps port.. even better will be 100 mbps.

The database contains all the main content on every page, there will only be a few static pages. Almost everything will be user content - articles, diary entries that kind of thing. The biggest tables will be those which contain all the words in all user content and the table which link words to articles.

Every page will be hitting the database, searches will be the biggest hit but it's all pretty efficient (well, I'll found out for sure when it goes live). I use the asp.net cache so it doesn't always do full lookups.

Users can upload images but they are stored on the hard disk not the database.

Sounds like I definitely need a database server but I will monitor it, thanks a lot.