NiftySpider‘s Bandwidth and Disk Usage
What do you mean by “unlimited disk space and data transfer”?
There are no set limits on the disk space or data transfer (bandwidth) that we provide in plans marked “unlimited”. We want you to have the resources you need to build a great online presence.
Still, we do need to be sure that we’re providing all of our customers with optimum service. As such, we do require all customers to be fully compliant with our Terms of Service and utilize disk space and bandwidth related to the normal operation of a personal or small business website.
While it is rare, we may need to put constraints on accounts that are adversely affecting other customers or otherwise utilizing or abusing resources beyond what would be expected of a personal or small business website.
What will happen to accounts that don’t comply with the Terms of Service or go beyond normal usage?
Through our NOC (Network Operations Center), we maintain a variety of human and automated controls to monitor customer and server activity. If the NOC identifies an account that is not in compliance with our Terms or that has the potential to negatively impact the performance of our systems, we may need to temporarily suspend that account. Of course, we will notify the administrative contact for the account and work with that customer to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
The most common situations involve customers who use their accounts for storage of files, particularly multimedia files that are not linked off of their websites. One thing to remember is that NiftySpider provides the disk space and bandwidth required to operate a personal or small business site. Our services may not be used to store or archive electronic files that are not available through the website.
What is “normal” usage?
Normal usage means that you operate a personal or small business website that utilizes resources in a manner similar to most of our other customers. For example, the system requirements of large corporations are not equal to those of small businesses and their resource requirements would not be considered normal for our architecture. Another example would be the storage of large numbers of video or audio files that may be associated with a site, but require more resources to support than a normal personal or business website would.
Why are the normal usage guidelines in place?
NiftySpider offers hosting through a shared environment; therefore, each site has the ability to impact the performance of thousands of other sites. While our pooled architecture minimizes this risk in comparison to the more common single-server design, we do occasionally experience disruptions that result from customer activity. This is an unusual occurrence, but one which we manage carefully to protect our users from service degradations. Still, we want our customers to understand that there are guidelines in place before they purchase our services.