Determining server bandwidth required in data center
 

Is there a way to calculate what bandwidth is required for our web server prior to our server going live in a data center?
We have a web store, do mass emailings to our list of 25,000 customers, and woluld like to also start audio streaming for an internet radio show, handle 1-hour podcasts for the show, and progress into making a library of 4-5 minute video tutorials available online to members.

I am running a LAMP stack on RHEL3.0 and using OS apps such as drupal, PHP List, Sugar CRM and RT.

The data center has offered us a 1.5 Meg dedicated pipe (not to exceed 1.5 Meg) +$75/Meg excess, or 10 GB total for the entire month.

I have no idea if I should choose a dedicated pipe or aggregate monthly bandwidth, or if what they are offering in bandwidth will even be adequate for my purposes. I have no history to base any of this on, as we are coming from a hosted environment on a shared server.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach this?

How many page views per day do you have?
The podcasts will eat up a lot of bandwidth. Do you plan to send only one hour of podcasts per day, or the same 1-hour podcast 24 hours a day? Will it be MP3 encoded? What bitrate?

I think 10GB is very sparse - you should try to find a hoster that offers you unlimited bandwidth, like 1&1 or Strato in Germany.

try ntop
 

you can try ntop for checking bandwidth usage for some time and then you can proceed

www.ntop.org