What are Transfer Limits?

Transfer Limits refer to the limitation on the amount of data you are able to send and receive, mostly relevant to a hosted website.

Whenever you visit a website, a certain amount of data is transferred, in your request, and the page that comes back from your request. The host of that website pays for bandwidth as the users of that site use it. The more visits a site generates, the more data is transferred, and the more the host has to pay. Therefore, sites with many visitors will incur larger charges than sites with relatively few visitors.

The amount of Data an ISP can transfer to or from a website is not an infinite amount. Much like paying more for a telephone call the longer it lasts, the more data transfer per month used, the more it costs an ISP to provide. Therefore, with websites that use a lot of bandwidth, certain limitations need to be applied. Therefore, many, if not all, hosting providers impose limitations (some published, some not) of the amount of bandwidth a site can use.

For example, on a Gold Hosting Account, there is a 2GB per month limitation imposed. This means that in any given month, your data transfer to or from your website cannot exceed 2GB worth of traffic. After this has been exceeded, further bandwidth is chargeable.