Member's areas: How much bandwidth do you burn through
 

Just how much of a load on a movie site is a well populated member's area?

Figure movies are cut into slices of 30 - 50MB each, total of around 600 files that size, membership of around 1,500. Buddy of mine is negotiating with someone that has a paysite with those specs for sale, but the bandwidth usage per month that he's quoting sounds light, interested in hearing what the GFY peeps think...

Although it obviously isnt this simple, you could make a formula.

3 tiers of users:

1 - Joe Bloggs, found the site was looking for a specific video. Signed up downloaded, and hasn't use his password since.
2 - Timmy Bloggs, found the site enjoyed 20-30 videos.
3 - Asshole McGee, signed up downloaded everything on the site and fucked off.

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Assuming 10% of your users are tier 1.
70% are tier 2
20% tier 3

[50 x (1% of 600) x (10% of 1500) = tier 1 b/w]
[50 x (10% of 600) x (70% of 1500) = tier 2 b/w]
etc etc

However this is an EXTREMLY rough guideline, every site varies obviously, but it could give you a basic building block to make your assumptions on. I'd say assuming you had 30gb of content and every member downloaded everything you'd need a 100mbit, but a 10-20mbit server would probably cover that members area.