What is your website's traffic? How can you find out how much you are using? What options do you have if it runs out? In this simple article, we answer all these questions.
The amount of information your hosting plan can send or receive is what is known as traffic. This includes:
- The number of visits you receive.
- Email usage: both the number of times you check your email and the emails you send.
- The use of your FTP system, which allows you to upload and download files from your VPS server.
For example, imagine you post a downloadable file on your website that is 150 KB in size. If 10 of your readers download that file, you will have used 1.500 KB (that is, 1,5 MB). In short, the more visits you receive, the more traffic you consume. In general, a corporate website or a personal blog will need less traffic than an e-commerce site, and that same e-commerce site will need less than a video download website.
With our servers, you can modify the specifications of your VM machines at any time, increasing their capacity if your traffic increases, paying only for what you need. You can check the amount you will have to pay for your usage whenever you want from your control panel. To learn more about our billing system, you can check here.
So, how much capacity do I need for my website?
If you are somewhat new to this, you may find it a little difficult to calculate the capacity you will need to purchase if you have not published your website yet. In any case, to make a reasonably accurate estimate, you will need to be able to answer the following questions:
- How many users do you think will access your website each day?
- How many pages will you have in total?
- How large will the different files you are going to upload be? How many of these can users download?
To make an estimate you will need to multiply the days of the month by the size of each page (including images) by the number of visits you expect to receive each day. Now multiply that figure by the number of pages per visit. Allow a little extra, just in case, and also for the other tasks you will need to perform, such as accessing your email or uploading files through the FTP system.
For example: 30 days x 100 KB per page x 150 visits per day x 4 pages per visit = 180.000 KB. If we convert this to GB, we get a result of 0,18 GB per month.
This will give you an initial estimate, but remember that it is only approximate. For example, you cannot know for certain how many visits you will receive per day, or the usage of the bots from the different search engines that will crawl your site. Also consider that page images will not have to load completely every time a user accesses them, since they will be stored in the browser cache. Therefore, the result you get will simply be a rough guide, at least until you have real traffic data.
What should I do if I exceed the capacity I purchased?
As a user, with our VPS and Cloud servers you can create up to ten VM machines, each with the memory, CPU, and SSD disk specifications you need.
If, with the 10 VM machines, your website exceeds the capacity they provide, all you need to do is contact us at soporte@clouding.io to increase your account limits.
In summary
Knowing your hosting traffic can help you better understand how users use your website, the files they download, and the pages they visit most. You do not need to worry if you exceed your account limit; just let us know and we will increase it immediately. Other than that, we will congratulate you, because that means visits to your website have increased!