The google.com homepage received on average 38 million unique hits per day over a 7 day period according to this compete story about the G1 release. This started me thinking, how much bandwidth does serving up Google’s homepage use in a year? Well some rudimentary maths left me with the following:
Homepage size = 15k (code + 8.5k logo image)
15k x 38 million page views x 365 days = 209,020,900,000k
209,020,900,000k = 24.3 terabytes of bandwidth
This is just to display the homepage of google.com and does not include the 165 local domains or the 400 million or so searches Google receives every day.
Of course, the bandwidth figure above assumes (and they are big assumptions!) that there is no browser or ISP caching and that the number of visits remains constant. However, it does highlight how for Google displaying even a low sized webpage requires a huge amount of bandwidth. It’s no surprise then that The Google’s biggest expense comes from running and maintaining their servers and why they are looking at new technologies to reduce costs such as creating their own renewable energy (wind, solar & geothermal), super efficient server farms and even server farms based at sea.
And if displaying Google’s simple homepage takes up so much bandwidth it’s not surprising that running YouTube has been estimated to cost nearly 1 million dollars a day and that the site uses as much bandwidth now as the whole internet did in 2000!
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December 1st, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Nice post!
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Very interesting. Nice one, thanks
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
With that many servers they’d be sucking up so mcuh power which comes from burning of coal… a few solar panels aren’t gonna make much difference. Good on them for choosing efficient server farms though.
December 19th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Very interesting.
Though you might like to compare just our primary data centre in London for example, which serves out Merchantize, Network Sense reporting, Sharp, our web sites and one or two odds and sods.
It is serving 26.7 Terrabytes - more than Google! We average over 780 Gigabits per day or 3.6 Gigabytes an hour continuously burting at peak times to alomsot 40 Gigabytes an hour.
We do this from two cabinets containing about 25-30 virtual servers and 4-5 physical boxes drawing a mere 24 amps of power - impresed?
Don’t you just love Geeky stats ;-)
December 19th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Darn it, just checked your maths Adam and we don’t serve more data than Google.com.
As the numbers you quote equate to 193 Terabytes of bandwidth
Still an impressive number though.