Bandwidth quota

[Simkin]

How is the bandwidth quota enforced?

On monthly basis, or, like CPU quota, on much shorter time basis?

(So that it is not 400Gig a month, but e.g. 9Meg a minute?)

[bboysteele]

I think it is based on a monthly amount. I haven't heard anything in regards it being treated like CPU time where you are only allowed this much bandwidth in this amount of time. Someone from Customer Support will need to verify this though.

[Simkin]

Me too, but the restrictions on CPU time, discussed in this forum, are not even mentioned in the hosting plan description.

One day, when my website had increased traffic, I noticed that it got slow. I was well below monthly bandwidth limit, but probably exceeded it, when recalculated on hourly basis.

[Mazzic]

I'm gonna say its monthly.

In your BlueHost Control Panel, under the general information, you will find an item that says "Bandwidth usage (current month)" and shows you the amount of bandwidth consumed. At the flip of the month this resets to 0.

[Simkin]

May be the box's bandwidth capacity was exceeded.

What is the box's bandwidth capacity?

[Hercules]

This seems to be the secret ingredient of Bluehost, but elsewhere it was mentioned that it's probably 3Mb per account.
However if you run things on your site like picture galleries, forums or other things that require a MySQL Dbase you'll probably face a CPU time out when traffic gets around your 3Mb limit as most heavy users mentioned here before, but Bluehost has come up with a heavy user CPU option, so this problem can be avoided now.

Matt once mentioned that Bluehost has a total of 800Mb, but I think those numbers are dated.
With that total, all users could only use 2,5GB of monthly traffic if all sites where visited equally.
So Bluehost will probably buy in extra bandwith each month as their client dbase an client activity grows.

[Simkin]

This seems to be the secret ingredient of Bluehost, but elsewhere it was mentioned that it's probably 3Mb per account.
3Mb per what period of time? Per minute?
I got 9Mb/per minute figure by dividing 400 Gig by the number of minutes in a month.

[bboysteele]

May be the box's bandwidth capacity was exceeded.

What is the box's bandwidth capacity?

Each box should have a least a couple 10/100MB card and I would guess they would be 10/100/1000MB. If each account is allowed 400gig to 750gigs (now) then the capacity for the box would have to match that or at least come close. The only thing that you might have to take into concideration is the amount of cpu you are using when using this bandwidth. If you have one user ftping a 1gig file to your site, it probably wouldn't be noticable but if you have 50 users doing it at the same time then that might be a problem.