A few weeks back I set up a new dedicated server with 800hosting.com. One of the attractive aspects of their dedicated server plan was the 1800 GB/month transfer limit. My web site currently serves about 4 GB/month. No problem!

So a couple of weeks ago I was trying to think up ways to use up all that extra bandwidth. I've still got some ideas for higher-bandwidth projects, but an easy one sort of fell into my lap. South By Southwest is offering a free download of music from over 750 bands via BitTorrent. The full download is 2.6 gigabytes. I thought I'd put some of my spare bandwidth to good use.

This seems to be a very popular download, as my server was uploading at a rate of 29.6 Mbits/s at its peak. It averaged about 24 Mbits/s over a full day. At that rate, I would transfer something like 7500 GB in a month, which would put me way over my transfer limit. I have already transferred 445 GB of my monthly limit, mostly in just the last few days. So, I have had to limit the upload rate to 500 kB/s to make sure I don't exceed my transfer limit.

1800 GB used to seem like a huge limit. Now it seems so small.