Wikipedia Statistics
Whilst doing a bit of research for a project, I took the time to look through Wikipedia Statistics — the results were staggering. Consider this: Wikipedia averages 40 thousand (40 000) requests per second. Thus, in 3 seconds, Wikipedia receives more requests than tumbledry has in the past 5 years.
What’s even more staggering is the traffic: Wikipedia averages 500 megabytes per second in bandwidth. For reference, that’s equivalent to about 12 music albums per second.
Totals: over 100 billion requests per month for Wikipedia articles, with over 1.3 petabytes of data. Plugging those numbers into something like Mosso’s calculator shows that hosting a website with traffic similar to Wikipedia’s would cost over $3 million per month.
Comments
Nils
How does Wikipedia operate? How does it pay for its servers, bandwidth, etc? If its traffic is so staggering, how do they manage it? There certainly aren’t any advertisements on the site (thank god). Can anyone with a little more knowledge in website managing (Alex, Justin, Richard, John) throw me a bone here?
Maybe I could just wikipedia Wikipedia.
Alexander Micek
I think they pay for it all in donations. I read up on it a little bit, and the annual cost to run Wikipedia is $4.6 million, which must mean the costs of all that traffic level off at a certain point.
Apparently, they are considering selling ads on the site to pay for all the costs. I find it too bad that any billionaire could step up and easily pay for Wikipedia for the next 15 years — but they don’t.