How would a Hosting package that includes a certain amount of traffic for your site be accepted. I have not seen this done anywhere. Every site needs traffic as much as it needs hosting. Why hasn't anyone put these two together?

Traffic = Bandwidth that's the reason.

Originally posted by TrafficMan
How would a Hosting package that includes a certain amount of traffic for your site be accepted. I have not seen this done anywhere. Every site needs traffic as much as it needs hosting. Why hasn't anyone put these two together?

Ummm...

Pretty much every web hosting plan includes a set amount of traffic (aka bandwidth utilization or data transfer). There are those who claim it's unlimited, but that's become more of a bad joke in the industry than anything else.

by traffic I mean actual hits or clickthru's

Originally posted by TrafficMan
by traffic I mean actual hits or clickthru's I'm not sure it was clear from your first post what you meant, but I think I get it now... you mean if included in the price of a hosting package would be a guarantee of a certain number of hits being brought there by the host's marketing efforts?

Personally, I wouldn't be interested. In my opinion and experience, such "guaranteed traffic" schemes involve too much of what's wrong with web marketing.

And, hits are no longer a usuable metric. Back in the early days when the goal of a website was to get people to visit it, hits mattered. And counters were used for bragging rights to back up claims of "I got more hits than you did". Guest books were also important back in those days.

Now, hits are a meaningless number, unrelated to the success or failure of a site. More important is where the hits are referred from and what they do after they reach the site, and how much money they spent.

They are the same as any other type of traffic through a place of business. You can have a lot of browsers, but you need a certain amount of buyers in order to be profitable. And if you are going to provide that traffic, you need to provide traffic that's going to make a purchase and not just window shop.

And that's the hard part. Traffic exchange is big in the adult industry, all those pop ups, pop unders, and exit windows are all there to route traffic to other sites, but that's a vertical market, and unless you target all of your hosting to a particular vertical market and focus on ways of moving quality traffic through the sites, it won't be terribly effective.

You'd need a mix of content and ecommerce sites focusing on this particular vertical market, and a method of moving the traffic from site to site. This is known in the industry as a portal.