If you have received an email from our system referring to “Hosting Bandwidth Limit Approaching” or “Hosting Bandwidth Limit Reached”, please see some additional information below.
WHAT DOES “MONTHLY BANDWIDTH” MEAN?
“Monthly Bandwidth” refers to the monthly allowed limit of data transfer for your selected hosting plan, also commonly referred to as “monthly traffic”. The following are all things which add to your monthly bandwidth:
- Web pages: When ever a web page is viewed by a person or search engine, it adds to bandwidth. If total graphics and code for a single page are say 100KB in size, then each time that page is accessed it will add to bandwidth total for the month.
- Emails: If you are using our hosted email solutions, each time an email is sent / received, it adds to bandwidth total for the month.
- File downloads: Each time a person or search engine downloads a file you have on your site (i.e. a PDF document, etc.) it adds to bandwidth total for the month.
- File uploads: Each time you upload files to your website, either via FTP or admin tools (i.e. photos), it adds to bandwidth total for the month.
All of these items add to the monthly bandwidth “counter” starting from 1st of the month to end of the month.
WHAT HAPPENS IF IT REACHES CAPACITY?
Our hosting plans includes triple the average amount of monthly bandwidth used by a website. So if your site has reached capacity, or is about to, chances are something dramatic has changed in the amount of traffic you receive / number of downloads from your site.
In the event your monthly bandwidth reaches 100% of your allowed capacity, our automated security systems will temporarily place a bandwidth suspension on the hosting account, which in turn displays a “temporarily down for bandwidth capacity” page in place of your website. This is much more common with shared hosting accounts, vs. VPS or Dedicated Server accounts, due to unexpected increase in traffic.
In some cases where we are familar with your website build and know that it may loose you sales, as a courtesy we reserve the right to auto upgrade your hosting plan bandwidth capacity at the current percentage cost within 24 hours if no response from you, if we can determine the traffic to be legitimate. See above information for more details of what this may entail. This does NOT guarantee this will be automatically updated, so we highly recommend you contact us back ASAP to discuss options.
WHY WOULD MY SITE BE TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED?
This is a security measure that protects our other clients hosted on the same server, as much as it protects your own website. Sometimes an unexpected spike in traffic happens due to promotions, or new large downloadable files your site is offering, or your site being hacked and used by hackers for sending out emails / illegal files. If left unchecked, the bandwidth used could reach huge proportions and potentially take down the entire server effecting everyone who is hosted upon it. Furthermore it is a money saver, vs. other hosting companies which will not even limit bandwidth and just auto charge you for any overages.
HOW DO I CHECK BANDWIDTH USAGE?
Checking your used bandwidth at anytime is easy. Simply login to your hosting account control panel, and look at the MONTHLY BANDWIDTH USAGE section.
a. For LINUX Hosting plans: Login to www.yoursite.com/cpanel/ using your FTP username and password, then look to the left column to see total bandwidth used and available.
b. For WINDOWS Hosting plans: Login to www.yoursite.com/myweb/ using your FTP username and password, then look to the top of the screen to see total bandwidth used and available.
WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?
You have several options available to you which include:
A. Upgrade your hosting account: You may upgrade your hosting account to next level account, or simply upgrade your monthly bandwidth. In most cases this will slightly increase your subscription fee. If you desire this option please contact us back for pricing and include the following information: your domain name, the amount of additional bandwidth you desire (i.e. in GB or indicate “double”, etc.).
B. Temporary increase to bandwidth: Another option is a temporary increase to your allowed monthly bandwidth, while you track down exactly what caused this increase and resolve it. This is traditionally done by utilizing your website hosting statistics program available via your hosting control panel. These reports will give you detailed information on what pages / files are being viewed the most, and the size of each, so you can determine if there is a way to remove those files or replace them with much smaller ones. There would be a one time fee for temporarily upgrading your monthly bandwidth, which would return to normal the 1st of the following month. If you would like us to examine your website to analysis the cause of this increase, the cost is $25 + cost of temporarily increasing bandwidth (typically $5-$10 depending). Contact us for more details and pricing.
We hope this information has helped you regarding your “monthly bandwidth” and options available.
