Websites pay for bandwidth the same way you pay for minutes on cell phone. You get a certain allotment, and if you go over, you pay more. Only instead of charging by the minute, the hosting companies charge by the amount of data actually sent over the lines. What constitutes "data sent over the lines?" When someone visits your website, they "download" the page they are viewing into their browser, and that constitutes data going over the line. A 50kb picture takes up only 50kb of web space on the server, but each "hit" or viewing by a visitor also takes 50kb. If ten people view it in a day, 500kb of bandwidth is used (10x50kb=500kb) for that day. If that happens all month, its 300 hits and that comes to 15,000kb, or 15 MB for the month. Its easy to see how bandwidth can be used up in a graphics-intensive site!
To give you an idea of usage, my messing-about.com website, a moderately busy site with a moderately busy Web Forums section, uses about 3.4 GB per month. Most personal or hobby related websites won't go over 1000mb per month, so we feel you're pretty safe with our plans, which provide from 500MB to 3GB of bandwidth.
So Why All the Fuss About Bandwidth?
If the only time bandwidth was used was when people actually visited your site, it would certainly be worth it. Because you want people to visit your site. But there are ways that your bandwidth can be used without people actually visiting your site!
One common way is for someone to link to a picture on your site from another site in such a way that your picture appears on their site. Its called "hot linking". Some sites will do that, but more often, the picture is linked to a discussion forums on the Internet, and every time someone on that message board views that picture, your bandwidth is used. People in the trade call this "bandwidth theft", but its usually done pretty innocently. Most people don't know that it costs the person hosting the website. We have "hot linking" blocked on our own sites for that reason, and you can also block hot linking if you choose to (we can even set it up for you as part of our free set up service).
There are other ways to run up bandwidth charges. If you try to get fancy, and set up an automatic email process to send you the activity log from your site every night, and it goes crazy and sends you 10,000 emails instead of just one ... well, that uses bandwidth. And, you could also get penalized like the guy who named his boat The Crawford, which became Cindy Crawford among his friends because his wife swore the boat was the "other woman." When he pulled the boat out of the water for repainting, and sanded her down, he posted a picture on his personal website with the caption "Cindy Crawford Nude." Evidently a web search engine like Google found the pic. He used up a lot of bandwidth that month having folks with absolutely no interest at all in a "bare boat" visit his site!
How to Combat Bandwidth Theft
Fortunately, there are ways to combat bandwidth theft. You can use our Cpanel application to protect files from "hot linking" And, you can control the content of your site, to ensure that seach engines aren't confused and think you're hosting pictures of super models in their birthday suits (and, by the way, we don't allow "adult" content in any of our accounts).
Finally, there are two ways to handle it if your account gets close to the bandwidth allotment. We install a "choke" on the site so that if you reach the allotment the site simply no longer accepts visits. That's bad in one respect, as someone coming to your website would not get your site at all. You can buy more bandwidth for a minimum payment of $5 per GB, and we'll restore the access, but you could be "down" for a couple of days while we process the payment.
You can also decide to upgrade to the next higher account. We upgrade you mid-month, and you finish that month out without paying the upgraded price. But you then have to re-register the next month at the higher plan. You can go back to the lesser plan after 30 days if you like, but you have to pay for at least one full month at the upgraded price.
If you have more questions, check out our Web Hosting forum, or send email me by Clicking Here! I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.
Frank Hagan
April, 2004. Signing Up Sign up at our Customer Control Center, or Click Here! to email me with any questions.