Data transfer explained

We operate on a Pay-As-You-Serve basis, charging you according to the amount of data that visitors to your web site retrieve from our servers each month. Our rate is currently £5.00 per gigabyte (GB) and is calculated pro-rata.

So how do you know how much your web site will cost you?

Well first you need to know how big your web pages are. Each page on your web site has a file size, typically expressed in KB (kilobytes). You can tell the file size of a web page by looking on your computers hard drive. For example, the web page you’re reading now is 4 KB in size.

In addition to this, any images that are displayed on your web page also have a file size. For example, the IntoNET Hosting logo at the top of this page is 12 KB, and the three images on the left hand side below the navigation buttons are 4 KB (Logic Red), 2 KB (W3C HTML) and 1 KB (W3C CSS) respectively.

Note: You only need to count images that are physically stored on your web site. If you are displaying images that are hosted elsewhere these do not count towards your web page total. In the case of this web page, the bottom two (W3C HTML & W3C CSS) are hosted on the www.w3.org web site and can be excluded from our calculation.

So, once you know the file size of the web page and all the images that are on it, you can work out the total data transfer for one page request. In our example, the total is 4 KB + 12 KB + 4 KB, giving 20 KB.

Therefore each time our example page is displayed, 20 KB of data transfer occurs. Since we bill in GB (gigabytes), you should know that there are 1,024 KB in 1 MB (megabyte) and 1,024 MB in one GB (gigabyte). So, our example page would need to be viewed 52,429 times before it totalled up 1 GB of data transfer, which in monetary terms would cost you £5.00 at our current rate.

To look at it another way, our 20 KB example page would cost just £0.000095 each time it was viewed.

So how do I know how many times my pages are being viewed?

Well nobody can tell you that in advance, unless you are moving your web site from another host that gives you this historic information. However we provide you with three different ways of keeping track of how busy your site is; raw server logs, a daily site statistics page and our monthly statements.

Raw server logs
Each individual request made to your web site (be it for web pages, the images on them or other files hosted on your web site), files you upload or download via FTP access, and e-mails sent & received through your domain, creates an entry in a variety of log files. You are free to download these log files at any time for use by a variety of log analysis programs.

Details of where these log files can be found will be given to you when you sign-up.

Daily site statistics page
Each day our servers automatically generate a web page in a special area of your web site that shows detailed statistics about the activity on your web site in the previous 30 days. It will tell you how many individual requests have been made, how many visitors, how much data transfer has occurred, which pages are most popular, where visitors have come from and much more.

Access to this statistics page is password protected so that only you can view it. Details of where this page can be found will be given to you when you sign-up.

Monthly statements
Each month we will send you a detailed statement showing how much data transfer your web site has consumed since the last billing period. Typically billing periods are monthly but may at our discretion be longer for sites that are not very busy, in order to avoid the excessive banking costs associated with very small transactions.

Please note that VAT at 17.5% will be added to all prices for customers within the European Union.