Broadband dongle - data allowance

[zentauri]

Anyone knows how to find out how much data Actinic transfers monthy?

I am going to move to new business premises but don't know how long will stay there therefore would rather not take a land line and broadband contract for a year or two.

I was wondering whether anyone runs their business on mobile broadband like 3 dongle and how much data they use monthly.

The maximum data allowance is 15GB which seems to be plenty but I have no way of telling how much I am using now? Any ideas please.....

I am on Actinic v10, well over 1000 products and growing
Updating and uploading website several times a day

Any help much appreciated

[fergusw]

Hi Aneta,
It really depends on a number of factors.

A web refresh uploads the entire website. You can glean the total size of this upload by noting the combined size of all the files uploaded to the acatalog folder (note: there are a few files also loaded into cgi-bin folder too!).
This figure will give you the data transferred during a refresh.

A web update however will only upload those files required to affect a change made in Actinic e.g. a single price change will only cause the HTML page and relevant CAT file to be uploaded to the site.

i.e. the more updates you do, the larger the upload data transfer.
If you change lots of images then these files also have to be uploaded, further increasing the data transfer.

Actinic V10, with a suitable hosting company, allows for compressed upload which zips the files into larger, compressed chunks, suitable for speedier uploads. This reduces the total data file size to a degree.


In summary it really depends on how big you site files are, however frequently you refresh the website, how frequently you update the site and the volume of updates as well.

[Sean Williams]

If you use Zen for your broadband provider, you get the best of both worlds - repeatedly voted the best business broadband and contracts are single monthly, so no tie-in. And it's not expensive btw.
Running four websites, a lot of browsing and hundreds of emails a day and we almost never use even half our 50GB a month allowance.
I'd have thought 15Gig might be enough for the Actinic work, but would be stretched a bit if you do lots of other stuff all day as well.
We also have a 3 mobile dongle at another location where there is no landline broadband and find it works well. Upload speed is the same as download, at 1Mb and is fairly consistent. However, we find that there is a little latency on the circuit (pings usually 75-100ms) and it can be a bit stop/start, particularly during the day when contention is higher, so it's not brilliant for doing a site refresh, but it is workable.
For the extra fiver a month I'd go for the Zen, but I guess you'll not get a landline contract for less than a year.
Why not test the signal/contention etc with a smartphone at that location first and see what it's like. My experience has been that 3G isn't so good in built up areas due to contention, whereas in the sticks, we don't have that problem.

[zentauri]

Thank you for your replies

Sean, Zen broadband would be most certainly an option, I didn't know they did monthly contracts

Fergus, my acatalog folder is about 248 800 000 bytes and cgi-bin is 2 800 000 bytes which gives in total over 250 000 000 bytes

Now, I am putting my thinking cap on :-)
is 250 000 000 bytes = 250 mb?
which is 1/4 GB?
which means I could do 60 full website refreshes a month?

I rarely refresh the entire website so my normal upload would be much smaller, seems that 15GB could do if my calculations above are not entirely wrong?

[Duncan Rounding]

It would be a good idea to test out the performance prior to purchasing as data strength and uplink speed can drastically affect performance, especially when uploading.

[leehack]

Dont forget email and browsing and stock syncing.....

[zentauri]

Thanks all!

They have 14 days returns policy so I may just get it and test it for a couple of weeks