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What is data transfer?

Data transfer is a measure of the activity of a given Web site in megabytes (or sometimes gigabytes) per month. When a browsing client (the Web browser of the visiting person) views your Web page their browser first sends a request for information about your Web page. The Web server software (on the dedicated machine on which your Web site is located) will then begin sending the HTML file requested to the browsing client. As this HTML document is sent from the Web server any graphics necessary for that Web page will also be sent. Streaming video, Java, and many other applications may also contribute to data transfer.

We use data transfer as a measure of your domain activity instead of "hits" because "hits" are not an accurate measure of our concern. A typical "hit" will transfer an average of 50,000 bytes (50 kilobytes) of data. We limit our clients to 50 megabytes of data transfer, you'd have approximately 1,000 hits available per month.

Data transfer is as much a commodity as is any other. Someone, or some organization, must pay for data transfer. Very active Web sites can require a great deal of data transfer. Some Web sites, like http://www.microsoft.com/ or http://www.cnn.com/ can require several T1s (1.55 megabits per second costing between $3000 and $5000 per month) or even T3s (45 megabits per second costing between $50,000 and $150,000 per month) and dozens of dedicated Web servers just to host a single Web sites URL. The companies that run these extremely active Web sites can sometimes pay many tens of thousands of dollars per month for the data transfer their Web site uses.

Your Web site, on the other hand, will probably not require anywhere near that amount of data transfer. On average, less than 1/2 of one percent of the Web domains we host exceed their data transfer for any given month. The sites that do are usually very active. When one of our clients happens to exceed their data transfer, we first notify the client and see what the client would like to do. We generally give them the option of upgrading to the next level account, or we let them stay where they are if they think it was just an unusually active month. We never invoice our clients for excess data transfer for the first month it occurs. We always attempt to contact you first and work out an agreeable solution for both of us.