There are two major limiting factors that Integris uses to differentiate between our hosting packages.
The first limiting factor is Disk Space and that is the size your website and emails take up on a hard drive. Disk Space does not go up unless emails or you add to it and Disk Space does not reset.
The second limiting factor is Bandwidth, Bandwidth is the measure of how much data is transferred between the web server and you or your customers. Bandwidth is measured for a month and then reset. Otherwise the bandwidth counter would always just keep climbing as your site gets used.
These limits allow us to appropriately distribute our resources. Also because of backups as a site gets larger it really uses up much more disk space than you would initially think.
Examples of how each would be used:
- In the first scenario lets follow the path of an email that is sent to you and it has a 1MB attachment. First the email is transmitted to the server from the sender to the server, this is a 1MB addition to your Bandwidth. Then the email is stored on the servers disk, this is a 1MB addition to your Disk Space. Next your email program looks on the server for new emails, if it finds one then your email program will download it adding 1MB to your Bandwidth. Depending on your email program settings the 1MB email stored on the server may remain for a week to a month before its removed and frees up that 1MB of space.
- In the second scenario lets look at how videos affect these limits. Lets say a 10MB video was uploaded to your site. When the video is added to the website it is uploaded, the upload adds 10MB to your Bandwidth. When the upload is finished that 10MB is stored on the Disk Space and this 10MB of storage will remail the same until the video is removed or replaced. Now lets assume 20 customers view that video a month, that will add 200MB of Bandwidth to your usage and is then reset each month. I used videos in this example but this is also the scenario for any image, music, PDF, or page that is on your site.
Because Bandwidth adds your usage for 30 days and then resets you will get Disk Space warnings all month long and Bandwidth warnings generally only come near the end of the month. The warning emails themselves tell you which warning it is.
Bandwidth is reset on the first of the month.
