My bad on the misunderstanding. Yes the amounts I quoted are correct, we pay $150/100-meg line (inside the colo @ 111 8th in NYC). So yes, the prices being quoted to you are crazy high. I assumed $10/10meg not $10/1meg. You need 20-30megs to play it safe... at that rate $200-$300/month is total BS inside the colo, they are grossly taking advantage. You should be able to rent a 1U with power and 100mb symetrical line for roughly $350-$400/month if you don't need to be an an ultra-low latency space. As for bandwidth usage, I can only estimate as the majority of my boxes share a 1.2 gigabit line with a few other guys. I can tell you that I record tick data, roughly 2-3GB per day so per month so that's 400-600GB of data that I pull per month. With internet browsing, youtube, (porn), as well as sending trades & orders I'd say its pretty safe to call it ~600GB of data per month that I use or pull. HTH, I'm still looking into getting a solid figure over last 6months for you.
Thanks WinstonTJ. Much appreciated. Please let me know your findings on the solid usage figure. Thanks.
I didn't mean to be pedantic. Perhaps I misunderstood you. There is no way to empirically query a connection that claims to be up, but is doing zero traffic, to find out whether it is down or merely not being used. You have to test whether it will pass data by...passing data! This could mean making sure you can ping something "out there" at a regular interval via the connection, and there are plenty of tools that will do this for you. As far as measuring the "potential speed of the connection", the answer is similar. You'll need to try to max out the connection and see where it tops out. You're paying for a 50 mbit/s link, but suspect you're getting crappy performance? Try sending (or pulling) a large chunk of data through it and see if you get what you're paying for. This is exactly how sites like speedtest.net measure your connection speed.
Thanks johnnyqpublic, error seems to be on behalf, I didn't understand enough about the subject but I think I understand better now. Only way for me to 'constantly' know the potential connection speed would be to try and 'constantly' pull more data than the connections compacity. Obviously this isn't practical. Your pinging suggestion obviously would confirm or deny the availability of the connection. I will google software solutions around that idea but am curious if you have something you would recommend? Thanks for you help.
No worries! Haven't used it myself since I'm not on Windows, but I've heard good things about EMCO Ping Monitor (http://www.emco.is/products/ping-monitor/features.php).