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.

# 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 will be 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.

Keep the footprint of your website slim. Send as few bytes over the wire as possible, so that you can serve more visitors with the same amount of traffic. Reducing your website weight will also make it load faster for your visitors and improve your SEO score.

• Keep an eye traffic metric growing over the month in the hosting dashboard
• Review images sizes to best match browser resolution and minimize traffic
• Check image compression, higher compression = less traffic
• Review the ratio of visitors compared to traffic
• Check network activity for often requested pages
• Consider better compression for local videos, or outsourcing
• Avoid animated GIFs, use video or other modern animated image formats

Also see performance intro.