Enjoying Rails

In an earlier posting we saw that tv2.dk in August 2007 served 142.132.680 pages and that the average page size was 395K and the average number of requests per page was 54.

How much traffic is this?

Doing some math it turns out that approximately 54 TB traffic and 7.7 billion requests during August! That’s a lot of traffic!

Jay.net in their Grand National package say that 33000 GB traffic/month will set you back 10000 kr. which is approximately 1900$. Note that it is 33000 GB Danish traffic and that you have to pay for international traffic as well. According to Alexa 87% of the tv2.dk’s traffic comes from Denmark. My guess is that tv2.dk’s 54 TB traffic in the jay.net setup will cost them around 4000$.

What if the site was hosted on Amazon EC2/S3?

One option is to let Amazon S3 serve all static content. Using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator the traffic is going to cost 8,699.44$ for the traffic itself and a request fee of 7,675.17$ totalling 16,374.61$! Letting the content from S3 removes the need for a dedicated server to serve static content but the request fee makes it rather costly.

Another option is to have a dedicated EC2 server for serving static content. The traffic is going to cost 8,699.44$ and the server itself 74.40$.

So jay.net turns out to be much cheaper than the Amazon offer for a high-traffic site like tv2.dk.