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Data Transfer and Bandwidth Usage

Who's Affected?
Data transfer and bandwidth usage effects all customers to some extent. Frame relay clients choose the bandwidth necessary for their application and have this number set by the frame size.
Domain customers have the option of choosing one of three packages for each Operating System preference based on their needs.
Dial-Up customers are limited only by the speed and bandwidth capability of their modem unless their Web site is very popular with other Internet users. A dial-up customer web site that proves very popular will need to convert their web site to one of our commercial domain packages.

Excess transfer fees will only affect customers whose data download volume exceeds that included with their plan (see the table below).

How do I track the amount of data that has been downloaded from my site?
All domain packages come with access to a web site statics program that can be used to track data transfer activity on a weekly or monthly basis. These detailed statistics can show you what domains are accessing your site, how many "hits" you are getting, how much data is being transferred, what type of browser people are using to look at your site, and more. You may also use any other third-party usage stats analysis program to analyze the raw log files generated in your domain account. Domain logs rotate early on Saturday morning, so for a complete week's analysis it'd be best to FTP your logs to your personal computer late Friday evening.


How Does it Work?
As an example, for a Silver or Emerald Domain Package web site that uses 10MB Web space and over the course of a month has 50 people look at every page and every graphic on that web site, the bandwidth usage adds up to 500MB.


NOTE: Most Web sites do not use 10MB of disk space and unless you have a truly exceptional site, it's rare that your visitors will look at every page and every graphic on your site. Our example is extreme, but it's used to clarify the pieces of the data download equation. If your entire Web site used 10MB of space, but most visitors only looked at 1MB of your data, you would be able to serve 500 people in a month and not exceed your limit.


Why Limit Data Transfer/Bandwidth?
Our Web server hardware and software for each hosting plan is configured for optimum performance at or below the limits listed above. If download volumes from extremely popular sites exceed the limits, the performance of the entire server suffers unless we perform costly upgrades. We're not penalizing customers for having popular Web sites, we are just ensuring that our policies support the upgrades when they are needed.

• Scale back the Web site -- It's obvious: a site that uses fewer megabytes will serve more viewers before exceeding the limit.

• Optimize the graphics -- You can fill a screen with text and use less than 1K, but the smallest Web graphic may use more than 6K. Scanned photos may be close to a megabyte unless care has been taken to optimize them. See Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites for design assisance.

• Upgrade to a different hosting plan -- The upgrade plans come with increased data download limits. See the table above.

• Don't offer any large files for download -- Graphics aren't the only big files that can be hiding in your Web directories. Microsoft Word and Excel files, Adobe Acrobat files, programs and games can be extremely large.