Questions on Traffic quota & FTP to subdomains

I wanted to ask a couple of questions, first off, is 1meg traffic a lot or a little. Could someone explain the concept? its just im not sure if this hosting package i am looking at using will allow for a lot of visitors or not.

the second question is about FTP and subdomains. I use SmartFTP and I am wondering how the heck I upload stuff to a subdomain or what I have to do to get it there....

forgive me for my lame questions I am not up to speed with it all.

cheers!
Rose

When you say 1meg of traffic I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Traffic is usually measured in page views or unique visitors. For example, if one person visits your website and views 10 pages then you have one unique visitor and 10 page views. 1 million page views per month would be a nice bit of traffic in my opinion, but I suppose it depends on what kind of site you have. However, hosting packages usually don't put any kind of limit on the number of page views or unique visitors.

If you mean bandwidth or "data transfer" then 1meg per month would be very low. Data transfer is measured as the total size of files downloaded when a visitor requests webpages or other files on your website. For example, if you have a page that is an html file of 20k and it contains 30K in images then everytime that page is requested it would use up 50K of data transfer. At that rate one meg of data transfer would be used up very quickly (about 20 page views of 50K each). Hosts usually measure bandwidth in gigabytes and even free hosts usually give 1-2 gig of data transfer per month, although free hosts sometimes impose a daily cap as well. Paid hosts should offer substantially more - usually somewhere in the realm of 10-50 gig per month with the option of buying more if you need it. I would not accept anything less than that for a paid hosting package.

On my host - and I'm pretty sure it's the same everywhere - a subdomain is just a directory or folder that has been configured as a subdomain, so uploading files to that subdomain just means uploading them to the folder/directory that I have designated as a subdomain. My host provides me with a "file manager" page that allows me to setup subdomains, so I'm not really sure how to do it any other way.

RichB covered just about everything. If you don't have the subdomain creator like him, you just have to create a .htaccess file (google search ".htaccess" with "I'm feeling lucky"). The average page uses about 2gigs of bandwidth monthly, on my payhost I have a whole bunch of files there for storage/viewing and I still average less then that, plus the average download per view is less then a meg....
So if you asking is that alot that you are using, no its not.

oops i meant 1 GIG

well this is the package i am talking about http://www.hostingbuzz.com.au/australia ... ting/mega/

ive put a couple of my customers on it because most of them wont have a huge amount of traffic i figured they would be pretty safe.

can anyone recommend any reputable hosting companies where i can get a fair bit for my money?

and thanks for your help folks

Well for 7.77 USD http://www.powweb.com is great, I have hosted 3 pages on it with no problem, and only two instances of down time that I have seen since january.

I'm not sure if it has to do with currency differences, but I took a look at the packages at hostingbuzz and they seem overpriced for what they are offering. Also their website seemed poorly designed: some of the webpages didn't display all that well in my IE browser, there were broken links in the main menu on the hosting page, and they refer to 1G of transfer as "extremely generous." None of this inspired much confidence.

By comparison http://www.ipower.com offers 30 gig of transfer, 500 M of disk space, up to 300 email accounts, support for MySQL databases and PHP dynamic scripting, and a ton of other features for $7.95US per month if you buy a year's worth of hosting at one time. This seems to be roughly comparable to the features offered by the host the b_heyer recommended, although they only seems to require 3 months paid in advance to get the low price.

I'm planning on changing to ipower in the near future, so I can't recommend them from personal experience, but I do know some people who use their services and seem happy with them. In any event, their package and the package at http://www.powweb.com should give you some idea of what's out there for the purpose of comparision.

1G of transfer may be enough for a personal site or a small business that doesn't get that much traffic, but if the site becomes popular, then the additional charges incurred when you exceed the minimum can begin to add up. I doubt most of the sites at ipower or powweb are using all or even most of the data transfer that comes with their hosting packages, but at least there is plenty of room for expansion, and the prices seem reasonable.

its funny you mention http://www.ipower.com because a friend of mine has been using that and has had no downtime with it at all and is more than happy with it. I think i will go with them, they've also been around for a while too.

cheers for all the information and advice!

I also doubt most of them are using all the services/space provided as well!

I realize its a very old thread but just wanted to add some extra information here because we just took over hostingbuzz, hostingbuzz is an Australian hosting provider, you can't compare Australian providers who have Australian servers on Australian networks to USA providers who use USA networks.

The cost of bandwidth in Australian is much more expensive and therefore if you need a good provider with generous allowances in the USA we also own http://www.dacsofthosting.com