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HOME: Hosting Account Issues - Misc

Misc issues related to hosting accounts that are not covered by the standard categories.

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3. Account bandwidth and data transfer issues

*** What is 'bandwidth' and 'data transfer'?

The terms are sometimes used interchangeably and refer to the amount of data that is transferred to and from your site during a calendar month. That would include data transferred from people viewing the site, email to and from the site, FTP traffic like uploads to the site, etc.

*** What is 'transfer quota'?

The term 'transfer quota' is the amount of data transfer that is allowed during a calendar month per your hosting account's current hosting plan. All of the hosting plans include a transfer quota. The sizes of the quotas generally increase with the higher level plans and should be a key factor in determining which plan best fits your site's needs.

*** Why am I getting a 'Transfer Quota' email?

This notice is sent per the Transfer Quota Alarm Limit setting in the Account Management section of your hosting account's online Account Manager. You may adjust the setting as you wish.

*** What happens when my hosting account uses more data transfer in a month than the transfer quota allows?

The hosting account will continue to operate as normal, even if the quota is exceeded. At the end of the month, your account will be charged for the overage and a service fee will be added.

For this reason, it's best for the webmaster to continuously monitor the account's data transfer usage and make sure that the Transfer Quota Alarm Limit setting in the Account Manager is set properly. The account's data transfer usage and alarm settings are shown in the Account Management, Resources Available, Resource Meter, and Site Statistics sections of the Account Manager.

You can avoid any end-of-month overage issues by upgrading your hosting account to a plan that suits the site's needs. Options and prices for plan upgrades can be found in the Upgrade section of your Account Manager and on our website.

*** How can I keep my site's data transfer down?

- Take care to not use overly large graphic images or multimedia files on your site. Such files should be kept as small in image size as needed and should be compressed when possible (e.g. JPEG compression).

A common problem is using a large image on a page, say 1024x768 pixels, and displaying it in the web page as a smaller image, say 200x150 pixels. In this case, the full size image file must be transferred to the browser whenever the page is viewed, wasting a large amount of date transfer and causing unnecessarily long page load times.

- Check for other sites that are linking to your graphics images. This is often referred to 'bandwidth theft' and 'direct linking'. The site statistics tool is useful in detecting this.

- Set your email software to use your ISP's sending mail (SMTP) server instead of the one provided with your hosting account.


Updated: August 11, 2004

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