Most Internet Service Providers have a limit on the amount of traffic a site can generate free of charge, after which additional charges will be applied.

The reason for this is that upstream providers, such as Telstra or Optus or any of them, impose a limit on traffic. Once upon a time only data in one direction (downloads) was counted towards the limit but in recent years some corporate genius figured out that "if we can charge for uploads as well the client will reach their limit faster and allow us to charge them more money!". It is simply a money making scheme for the big providers upstream of the little provider. We are a little provider.

We have limits on traffic just like everyone else and at the end of the day we are a business just like any other and we must at least cover costs. The problem with living in a small town is that we get to know everyone, we all become mates and under normal circumstances "mates rates" would apply. In this case "mates rates" can't come into the equation because we would go broke and the service would shut down. The difficulties you would face if we shut down would be enormous. Transferring your sites to other providers, paying a lot more for extra services such as SQL, PHP, etc. would increase your current hosting costs by about 200% - and you don't want that do you. You are also a business and as such you need to make a living, or at least cover costs.

On top of the costs associated with bandwidth we have additional costs which are in the thousands of dollars. We must provide routers, a number of computers to run different services on, electricity for all the equipment to run 24 /7. We must also provide some form of off site backup and redundancy should the service fail.

Bottom line is that we must charge for the services we provide to you. We have kept the costs down as best we can by offering domain names at cost prices, web hosting at extremely low prices, and we have provided extra services to many at no extra cost to them as well as passing on Excess Usage charges at the same price we get charged at (we make nothing on it).

If your usage is excessive then consider upgrading your existing plan. Most clients are on the "Small business Package" plan offering 1 GB of Data Transfer. By upgrading to the "Premium Business Plan" you can double the amount of traffic your site is allocated.

The truth is that data limits imposed by the big players such as Telstra are nothing more than a money spinner for them. Smaller providers such as ourselves have no choice and wont ever have a choice whilst greed exists in larger corporations.

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