$$$
Even an old Pentium 4 w/ a couple gigs of RAM is probably all he needs.
Even an old Pentium 4 w/ a couple gigs of RAM is probably all he needs.
A micro-instance on EC2 for moderate traffic does wonders if properly optimized (i.e. Nginx, async behavior, CloudFront) and is costing me something like 15 USD per month (the total bill, which includes EBS, S3 and CF), which is cheaper than my home broadband line which is totally unusable for any kind of traffic (because it is ADSL, download is good but uploading sucks).
I also moved my private Git repositories on it, from Github and I'm probably going to end my subscription with them. It is also configured as an email server with which I spammed my old high-school colleagues before our 10-years reunion :-)
Comcast business class w/ a fixed-ip (I have set up several to stream 720p HD surveillance cameras), has upload tiers in 2Mbps, 5Mbps, and 10Mbps...and it starts at $60/month.
All he is serving is text, no images, video, or audio.
Verizon Fios has 5Mbps, 25Mbps, and 35Mbps upload tiers.
A Fios 35Mbps up and down connection is $125/mo. Not bad for UNLIMITED bandwidth.
Anecdotal evidence: http://seesarasotalive.com/sarasota-webcams - moved from rackspace to Fios
This would make for an article or blog post I'd love to read.
I'd love to read more about setting up nginx, ec2, s3 and cf.