OK, my website plan gives me 5GB bandwidth per month. I looked at my summary thus far and this is what it says Bandwidth Monitor (for cycle beginning Mon Jul 01 2002) Used / Threshold: 1 MB / 5240 MB (1180946 bytes / 5494538240 bytes) Cycle Start: Day 1 of month So I've only used 1 MB of bandwidth?! WOW! And how does that stuff work? The little gif on the front page is like 80kb, another image is 39kb and the third image is only around20kb, so thats 150kb or so total for my homepage maybe including text and all, right? Does this affect EVERY TIME someone goes to another page then backs out into the home page? Maybe I should have them open up in seperate windows huh? I just don't want to exceed it, not that a million people are gonna flood my site. Just making sure. Someone please enlighten me and as usual, thanks.
Any time something is downloaded from your site, it counts against your bandwidth. If someone is going back and forth on your pages and grabbing all items that constitute those pages from their cache, then you're not actually serving them any data; therefore that doesn't count against your bandwidth. Someone smarter can come along and tell you (and me) if that includes uploads too...
I think keeley pretty much nailed it. The bandwidth is counted against everytime those graphics are forced to be re-loaded. If they hit "back" on their browser and the browser just loads a cached version of the page, then it won't count against you, but if it is forced to re-load all the images, it does count against you. By the way, unless your site is really graphics intensive or has a bunch of files, 5 GB should be more than enough transfer per month, but then I'd go ahead and keep a watch on that to be sure...
good point about the upload... i never considered uploads as part of bandwidth, but are they? anyone?
i've been with serveral webhosting providers and at least from my experience uploads do count against your bandwidth. pretty much any data passing through the switch counts as bandwidth.
