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Network transfer is very similar to buying long distance from your phone
company. The difference being that the phone company charges per minute
while internet traffic is charged by volume of communication between your
site and the visitor's computer. |
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How network transfer is calculated:
3,000 MB (3GB) of transfer each month is included with
your hosting fees. Excess transfer over 3GB is billable at $0.02 per 1MB per month.
You can view your actual transfer usage details by clicking on the View
Statistics icon from inside site administration. |
Analyzing your
network transfer usage:
The vast majority of websites will not exceed the 3GB of transfer in a
month. To view real time statistics regarding transfer volume you can click
on the View Statistics icon from inside site administration. You will find
an up-to-the-minute analysis similar to the image below.
In the example below you will notice that in April (blue arrow) this web
site used 220389 kilobytes (220Mb) of transfer. This is far below the 3000
Megabytes (3GB) included with the hosting fees therefore no additional charges apply.
However, in March (orange arrow) this site used 4349457 kilobytes (4349Mb or
4.349Gb) of transfer. This exceeded the 3Gb of transfer by 1.349Gb (1349Mb).
At the rate of $0.02 per 1Mb the excess usage fees were $26.98 (1349Mb x
$0.02 = $26.98).
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usage fees are calculated daily the above example is an approximation of the
actual billable amount. Exact costs are determined by dividing the 3GB
monthly allocation by 30 days. This results in 100Mb per day. Exceeding
100Mb per day will incur excess usage fees for that day. The daily usage is
then accumulated for the 30 day period to arrive at your total. You can view
the daily usage by clicking on the Month (highlighted above by the green
arrow). This provides extensive cumulative details about traffic patterns
down to the hour. |
If you exceed 3Gb of transfer additional usage fees apply to pay for the
additional resources needed to support your website. These resources include:
- Traffic over telecom lines: Much like
your long distance phone bill the largest cost related to traffic volume
is paid to telecom companies such as Sprint, AT&T, MCI and others to pay
for your traffic that runs across their communication lines stretched
around the globe. The telecoms charge us for your usage, we simply pass
those costs along to you.
- CPU time utilization: Every request
to your website requires the server to utilize it's processing power to
deliver the results. If you have thousands of people visiting your website
then additional resources are required to support them.
- Hardware utilization: The same is
true for the hardware such as the hard drives, back-up systems and
administration requirements. As your traffic volume grows each of these
requires more attention to keep them active and running smoothly.
Reducing the transfer volume:
- Optimize or eliminate images: Images
are the reason you may be experiencing excessive transfer volume. Reducing
your images by half will reduce your transfer usage by half for the same
amount of visitors. All images on your website should be optimized to
reduce their file size. As an example: One image that is 10Kb in size sent
to 10,000 visitors equals 100MB of transfer. If your site has dozens of
images per page your costs could quickly escalate as the number of
visitors increases. If you take a look at popular sites like yahoo.com or
amazon.com as examples you will see that they use very few, small graphics
on their web pages and a lot of text. This is to reduce transfer volume.
It's up to you to determine the value of the images on your site.
- Use site statistics to find and optimize high
traffic pages: Often times you can use site statistics to
determine the pages most frequently seen. Reducing the size of those pages
can have a significant impact.
- Be careful with image links: If other
sites link to your images or you link to images on your website in an
auction, EVERY time the auction page is displayed or the image is
displayed on another website the transfer is accumulated on your website.
For example, lets say you auction your car on ebay and place the images on
your website. If you have 6 images of 50Kb each and a thousand people view
your auction a dozen times over the course of a week then your transfer
usage for that auction will be 3.6GB!
Competitive comparisons:
We benchmark our competition to ensure that we are not only competitive
but that we provide better value at lower rates. As an example, the web
hosting company Verio charges 10 cents per 1MB of overage. Compare this to
our rate of $0.02 per 1MB of overage and you will quickly see that along
with providing superior solutions our rates will cost you much less.
As your business and traffic grows the savings become substantial.
How can we do this? Because we have partnered with the industries leading
telecom providers and utilize volume pricing to pass along the savings to
you. |
High traffic solutions:
If you have high traffic requirements we have negotiated volume traffic
pricing with our telecom suppliers. Under this plan you can purchase blocks
of transfer for flat monthly rates that are significantly less than the per
megabyte fees.
Understanding your traffic patterns may
take time. If you don't already have a history of your website traffic you
may need several months of usage before you can accurately determine how
much transfer you need. |
