Traffic

# Booking

Traffic measures the data transfer that is caused by visitors browsing around your website (environment). It is booked per environment. Traffic is a passive component. It just happens. The max usage is billed over the month. It's designed in tiers and as most websites have predictable traffic patterns you can expect the same costs monthly. Most websites hosted here stay on the lowest tier.

# What counts as traffic

Traffic is measured at the load balancer in front of the environment. It counts every HTTP request in both directions:

Responses carry the HTML, images, scripts, styles, and downloads, so they make up most of the traffic of a website. Incoming data only adds up for sites that receive a lot: file uploads, large API payloads, or bots posting forms.

Not counted: SSH and SFTP, deployments, MySQL connections, and requests the app makes to other services, such as APIs or e-mail.

The traffic metric graphs the same number per hour or day and lists the URLs that transfer the most.

# Scaling

When autoscaling is enabled, smaller and larger plans are automatically booked, based on usage. When autoscaling is disabled, the traffic will capped at the chosen level. Once the limit is reached, the environment will go offline until the next billing cycle (next month) or until the plan is upgraded.

# Why traffic grows

In many cases, increased traffic usage will correlate with more website visitors. This also can have an effect on other booked resources. Check the website performance. But new uploads or changed usage patterns can also be a source of increased or decreased traffic usage, consider crawler bots too.

# Avoid website obesity

There is of course a correlation between the number of visitors and the traffic. But it should be noted, that most high traffic usage is caused by fat websites. A slimmer website serves more visitors on the same tier and loads faster for each of them.

Find the heavy assets and cut them down: see reduce page weight.