How to decide the what Connection type is needed. TI, DS*?

lestat said: "Hello everyone, I have a very basic question, but first let me give you some backround. I am an A+ Tech, I went to school for network admin, and C/C++ programming. I was a junior administrator for some time and have extensive knowledge of Apache and for the last year I have been honning my skills in PHP and MySQL. I have been working for a small business for a little over a year, We have always had our website and E-Mail handled by a freind of the owners. Currently there are two new offices opening and one that has been open for a few months. These new offices are licenced agreements, so they are not really part of the company. Well we have decided that it would be beneficial to take over the hosting of our own site, as well as any new lisenced companies we sell. Now basicallly right now the site is information only. He had a designer design a new site and a developer develop it. I have allready built a backbone for the intranet and information sharing across the WAN. The only thing left is to hash out the website issue. So basically may question is what will we need as far as connection speed to serve out an efficient site. Basically we will be taking the website and making the necessary edits to represent each office. So here are the site specs. 1. Starting with 3 domains, information pages about 9 or 10 -- Needs to be scalable. I have designed servers that I feel can handle about 10 sites per machine. All site are using Flash for now, I would like to convert them all to Java Script in the future 2. We will be adding a small shopping area that will service all of the sites. Maybe 20 products total. 3. Email hosting for about 50 user now and this will scale up by about 15 per site that we add. So what type of conection should we be looking at for this project, T1, Fraqctional or what. I have quotes from cable for business optimum online at 10 mbps down and 1.5 up, I will Be talking to Verizon Bus DSL today. To me I would say this is plenty. So I know that at some point in school we went over this stuff, just a long time ago and I have never had to worry about these issues before. Also the T1 providers I looked at all advertise fractional T1 for $200+ at 1.5 mbps, Now call me stupid but isnt that even slower then the connection speeds cable is offering in there $79.99 package? So maybe I need a little tutorial on conection types and speed. Thanks in advance and I look forward to being apart of your community."

edwin said: "hello and welcome to web-mastery, have you considered a dedicated server rather than a dedicated connection? the t1 is a great solution, but you need around $600 including local loop, so its not a cheap solution. if you do go with a t1 you have a nice advantage, and that is extra ip addresses. you can setup vhosts and virtual ethernet interfaces and grow your network out pretty good. cable connections are probably not a good bet. you can use them for hosting, but they're excluded. but you are right, they are at a faster speed than fractional t1s, but they are shared connections, not dedicated. do you need bandwith for outgoing access also or is this just for hosting the sites?"

lestat said: "Thanks for the fast response. I will be using a dedicated server for the hosting, there will only be traffic associated with the site and the E-Mail Server. We will install a cable conection to serve out the employees internet access and the company intranet. I allready dusted of the apache vhost Manual so that is the plan for handleing multiple IPs cost effectively. Now I know that Cable puts you on a subnet and depending on the time of day, the quoted speeds will be dramatically lower. Also I know that cable wont say that they are giving a static IP however they are non-the less. I have offices that I set up over ayear ago with remote admin based on IP and port forwarding to address individual machine in the office and the IP's been the same. So if I understand, the advantages of paying the extra are. Constant bandwidth -- Cable degrades depending on load of the subnet Multiple IPs -- Much less of a hassle to have multiple LAN cards in the machine and assign them different IPs More efficient as well. So also I would assume that, if the website is the heart of the business without it there is no business. It would be in our best interest to go T1 and pay the extra. I dont think I would chose a fractional, only because I feel 1.5 is slow enough, for the price."

Darren said: "Lestat, it sounds like you have a very good understanding. You also have a lot more control over the T1 networking, rather than the cable. You can configure your own DNS servers, SMTP servers etc. Quality T1's are around $600 including local loop."