Might be a stupid question but: when talking about bandwidth, are we talking about both inbound and outbound traffic? So, when webhost are saying that max transfer limit is say 5-8 GB/month, the sum of inbound and outbound traffic?

Best regards,
August

Yes, uploading and downloading both count, from http and ftp.

Ok, how often do hosts include email & telnet traffic as a part of the total bandwidth?

telnet? maybe ftp... and some do, some don't, best to ask if it is really a concern, but if the bulk of your traffic is from email, then...

Alabanza based hosts include e-mail as well, but interestingly my old hosting account with Hostsave.com (part of Affinity.net) does not.
They even give you 6MB of disk space per e-mail account on top of the web space, which is a pretty generous package.

Gordon

But how reliable is it to measure the traffic of email? From what I heard, this is not so reliable as measuring http or ftp. What methods are used to measure the traffic? Log-files or?

August,

Generally e-mail will be counted as up-stream traffic, as the e-mail gets sent through the SMTP of the server to your e-mail recipient, so this counts as up-stream bandwidth. And hosts will monitor it the same way as they monitor HTTP/FTP traffic.

With most of the hosts I've seen they won't count FTP uploading as part of your bandwidth; however, anonymous FTP is quite different and hosts will count it towards your bandwidth costs.

Telnet is hardly ever considered to be part of 'bandwidth' as it's a different function and hard to try and monitor the bandwidth of... And it's usually not worth the effort either.

Have you seen http://www.hosthelp.com? It's quite useful for explaining some other terms....

As Chicken (a god in my mind, mind you, even if shown only as a mere moderator) said above, policies differ from host to host, so it's wise to ask -- and ask for *explicit* explanations of bandwith charges.

For instance, I currently work with a couple of dozen different hosts, and about half do not count e-mail traffic, whilst about half do.

If e-mail traffic is significant on your part, this can be a factor in choosing a host.