We’ve been talking about terabytes (TB) a lot – specifically with regard to our newest special, offering 10 terabytes of bandwidth at no additional cost. In fact, today through Aug. 31, we’re offering a deluxe version of the promo: 10 TB of free bandwidth on top of our discounted server prices and FREE setup.

We talk about how great a deal the 10 TB bandwidth promotion is, but what does 10 terabytes of data look like, anyway? We all know it’s a lot… but I decided to figure out just how much it would be in terms of other measurements.

After a little Googling, I learned that 10 terabytes is equivalent to:

• 10,995,116,277,760 bytes
• 87,960,930,222,080 bits
• The data in 800,000 phone books
• 4 billion single-spaced, typewritten pages
• 16,000 audio CDs
• The memory capacity of eight human brains (we’re not saying whose)
• The entire Library of Congress

Those are interesting, but we wanted to come up with our own visual, so we enlisted our calculators: Picture a small craft bead (an 11 mm x 8 mm cylinder), and imagine that the bead represents one bit (1 b) of data. Eight beads would equal one byte (1 B); 8,192 beads would equal one kilobyte (1 KB); 8,388,608 beads would equal one megabyte (1 MB); etc.

To hold the equivalent of 10 terabytes worth of “bit beads,” you would need more than 1.75 billion 10-gallon tanks. If you piled the beads one foot deep, they would cover 84.7 square miles. If they were used to cover Houston’s 579.4 square miles, we’d have a bead carpet 1.75 inches deep within the city limits.

It’s incredible, right?

Let’s think of it in terms of servers: What is a real-world example of what you can do with 10 TB of bandwidth every month? I’m glad you asked.

You can make an MP3 of yourself singing to your dog and make the file available on your server. When it becomes the latest viral phenomenon, your 10 TB of bandwidth would cover about 3.5 million downloads. You’d be well on your way to your own reality show by the time you got your next month’s server bill … where your 10 TB promo server wasn’t charged a penny of bandwidth overages.

No matter how you measure it … 10 terabytes is a lot.

Help us think big: How would you visualize and explain 10 terabytes?

-John