I'm working on a web app in my limited spare time which, if all goes well, will require storing and serving a large number of small files (HTML, JS & images mainly). I'm going to get a VPS from Linode to start with (and possibly join up with a CDN) but I'm not sure how to estimate how many resources each user will require and whether I'm going to lose money off them. For example, I don't want a $10/mo user costing me $50 in bandwidth. I'll set limits obviously, but right now these are just totally abitrary; they could be far too conservative or far too generous!<p>I realise this isn't very specific but I was curious how other people handle things like this - especially when you have no idea how take up will be, or average usage loads?
Generally speaking, bandwidth is cheap. You can get an extra 100gb of bandwidth added on to any linode for $10/mo. S3 bandwidth is incredibly cheap at $0.15 per gb for the first 10 terabytes after that it gets cheaper.<p>More S3 pricing information can be found here (<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/</a>)<p>Using those numbers you can generally figure out how much you would need to charge a user to stay profitable.