Data Transfer Consideration

One of important things in choosing an affordable web hosting is data transfer capacity. Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.
In a more broad term, this is the amount of data that can be accessed during a given period of time. This is a crucial thing to check before signing up for a web hosting plan because going over your allowed limit will result in a fee or even a temporary shut down of your site. 500 MB of data transfer is about 20,000 page viewings. This is also known as bandwidth or site traffic.

To give you a basic idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, typical new sites that are not archives for download material, use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), you will need to also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage?

Don’t believe any commercial web host that advertises “unlimited bandwidth”. The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exhorbitant bill for having “exceeded” the “unlimited bandwidth”. Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. Stay clear of any host that advertises “unlimited transfer”, even if the exact amount is specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements). Usually you will find that they redefine “unlimited” to be limited in some way.