It came to my attention the a few days ago that the online radio station U7Radio.org was having some trouble meeting demand for their 24/7 Art Bell streams. I decided to donate 300 slots to them, of which, over 175 have been used during the nights. I hope to continue this service, as there is nothing I enjoy more than a server getting some real-world use!

I did some quick math, and found that at 24kbps (the going rate for Art Bell streams) 300 slots uses around 7200kbps, 7.2mbps, or a little less than 1 megabyte per second (900kb/s). That is really minimal when you look at if from that standpoint. I think that my vps could easily push out around 1.5 mb/s for an extended duration, so I have plenty of capacity. The hardest part is getting the listeners to connect to my server IP and not that of the original streams. It seems that many people are not connecting through services such as shoutcast, but through direct IP address of the streams, which fills up the original server, leaving my relays half-full. Perhaps if I keep the relay going for a good while, the owner of the stream can post the IP address of my server so people can program that address into their IP radios.

It will be interesting to see how my bandwidth usage goes up with the new relays. The first two days are already averaging over 40gb per day. I expect that number to maintain, or even grow in the coming weeks. That would push my monthly usage to over 1.2 TB per month. My plan has a 2TB limit, so that is something to look out for. I don’t expect to break that though, as I am not using the server for much else currently. It would be fun to get a box solely dedicated to relays though, and I might invest in one in the future if listenership continues to climb. I could even see renting out a service for $5 a month for a 100slot relay or something similar to that.

In case any of you are wondering, my host is VolumeDrive.com. They are a budget provider, and have mixed reviews online. However, I haven’t really had any complaints about them for VPS hosting, and at the price, they simply CANNOT be beat.  I would recommend them to anybody wanting a low-cost, non mission-critical VPS host to play around with. Their network is Burstnet (so I’ve heard), but it is reliable enough for my needs.

Bandwidth usage on my VPS. It shows how much my network traffic increased with U7Radio’s listeners.