This must be baked already, but I can't find it anywhere...

My situation is this: my web hosting provider recently increased my bandwidth to 400GB/month. That's about 390GB/mo. more than I use. What to do with the extra? How about sell it cheap to other web sites to use to host their images? They get cheap extra capacity and I get to recoup some of my hosting costs.

At its most basic, this idea is for a forum for people to buy and sell this bandwidth. Obviously, a site that matches buyers to sellers and does the payment transactions is the next step.

At its most complex, this idea could involve a full front-end service like Akamai for distributing requests/load, managing the location of content, etc.
-- drzeus, Feb 03 2006

You could use the electricity markets for your trading model.

However, bandwidth seems to be a cheap commodity these days - my own hosting provider gives me unlimited bandwidth.
-- DrCurry, Feb 03 2006


keep reading this as - distributed hosting baker
-- po, Feb 03 2006


People do it all the time. You are more likely to find someone who does that in your local yellow pages before you actually find someone over the internet. Also I have seen some people actually get their own server and T1 or T3 service for their own business and then lease out web space and bandwidth.
-- Jscotty, Feb 04 2006


Your provider gives you 400GB exactly because he knows you won't be using more than 10GB. Not you specifically, of course, but the proverbial 'average user'. If everyone started using their bandwidth to the max, ISPs would be overwhelmed.
-- lkozma, Sep 07 2007



random, halfbakery