Traffic
The traffic is the amount of data that your account causes to be transferred from and to the server. For example when a visitor opens your site in their browser a small HTTP request is sent to the server and it returns a respective HTTP response which in most cases contains the page that the visitor requested. Traffic is generated as well when you upload or download files through FTP and when you access our mail servers. Most of the time 99% of your traffic will be used up for serving web pages and downloading files via HTTP and the traffic used for all other tasks will be neglectible.
Estimating how much traffic you will need
This is the most important question to consider when you're choosing a hosting plan. If you're just starting to develop your site buy the smallest plan - you can always upgrade if your site grows big and popular. If you already have a site you should try to estimate how many visits you will get per day. You can then calculate the size of a page of your site by opening it in a web browser and saving the page to your local disk like this:
Open the page in your favorite web browser
Select File->Save As... (or File->Save Page As...) from the browser's menu.
Choose an empty folder on your disk and save the page.
Navigate to the folder using your favorite file manager.
View the properties of the folder (select properties from the right-click popup menu).
You should see the size of the folder in bytes, for example 100,000.
Each visit to that page will generate that many bytes of traffic. If you expect to have 100 visits per day your site will generate 100x100,000 bytes or approximately 10 megabytes of traffic per day.
You need to repeat this procedure for the other pages on your site as well.
When you're out of traffic
If you get near your monthly traffic quota you will be notified via the Control Panel. In this case we'll recommend that you visit your site's statistics page (see the statistics chapter of the Control Panel manual) to get an idea which parts of your site generate most traffic.
You will have then a number of choices:
Upgrade to a hosting plan that includes more traffic. Please contact our support service for details on how to do that.
Do nothing and let your traffic usage get past your traffic quota. In this case you will need to pay $5 for each extra gigabyte. If you do not wish to pay and you have purchased hosting for more than one month we will move the expiration date of your hosting account earlier to compensate for the overage. If you do not wish to pay and do not have prepaid months we will send you a notice about the possible temporary termination of your hosting account.
We may disable your account at any time if you exceed your quota and your site keeps generating steadily lots of traffic)
If the traffic is caused by files you have set up for download you can reduce the traffic your site generates by moving those files into another account or removing those files (if that is an option for you).