The Lines: T1, T3, DS3, OC3
You should gain a good knowledge of these labels! Many of us dont know the real meaning and consequently dont understand which one of these available lines would better suit our needs. In the adult entertainment business its easy to see that the size and the amount of data (transmitted/received) changes according the bulk of traffic. The above labels (T1, T3, DS3, OC3) are just names used to describe a certain amount of data transmitted at once. You can think about it as a pipe, and web pages and data as water. The wider the pipe is, the more water you will be able to send through at once: or the better the line is, the more information (text, web pages, video, images, audio) you will be able to send at once! For most websites it comes down to how many people are looking at the page at once (during the busiest time of day) and how much information they are getting from the page.

T1 (1.5 Mbps) - This line is able to transmit about 17 gigabytes per day. Lets imagine an adult oriented site with just a few graphics, for example 20 pictures, spread over 4-5 pages with some text. It would take roughly a visitation level of 40,000 people per day to have that site transferring that much data per day.

T3 (45 Mbps) - This line is equal to about 30 T1s.

DS3 (45 Mbps) - This line is the digital version of a T3. These lines can be presented over copper, coax, or optical fiber.

OC3 (155 Mbps) – In layman’s terms, a shit-load of bandwidth. Digital, presented over optical fiber.

Most of you for sure won’t need anything close to an OC3 line, but its good to know about labels so that you aren’t hypnotized by your web hosting company when they try to strike you with big words! Well it isnt so important what kind of pipe they have as long as they dont try to put too much water trough it (too many clients/web pages on it).

The second piece of the puzzle for choosing web hosting is what hardware they are putting your pages on. If they provide to you with something that is similar to a desktop computer, then it doesnt really matter how big the pipe is... the computer will get slower and slower trying to send out your pages. Consequently another question could be: "What kind of servers are you running and how much load level do you allow on them?" They could lie here, but you may be able to check up on this. Take a look at their client list, and if they tell you they have 5 Pentium 155s and the list has like 200 clients that are mostly adult sites, you can imagine they either they lied about their clients or you are going to be on a really slow server. Also you need to find out what type of operating system the server is using. UNIX based operating systems are good for supporting heavy traffic like that of adult entertainment sites.

The last piece of the puzzle is the routing equipment you are going to use (routers, hubs, etc...). To use the water analogy you can think about routers and hubs as on the ends of the pipe. If the pipe is 6 inches in diameter but the fitting on the end only opens to 3 inches, then you cant use the whole pipe. The chain is only as good as the weakest link and the routing equipment is the link between the lines and the servers. So, be sure to ask your future web hosting provider what kind of equipment they have. I dont have tons of info on brands and what I print here would get outdated too quickly anyway. Just remember that there are 3 primary pieces: lines, servers, and routing equipment (which should make full use of lines coming in). Well, you may not be an expert on hosting after reading this article, but hopefully you are better prepared to approach finding a host for your websites.