In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in Gigabyte per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer.
Consider this example:
There's a pipe that delivers water from your rented water tank to your home. As you request water, the water company delivers it to you. All the while, they are keeping track of how much water was delivered to you, during a billing cycle. You have a contract with the water company in which they agree to charge you a fixed dollar amount per billing cycle, provided you do not request more water than the allowable quantity, as defined in your contract. If you do request more water, they will not deny you ... but you will incur additional charges for the extra water requested / delivered.
With that example in mind, web-pages typically equate to a small quantity of water ... while images, videos, PDFs and other similar media can potentially equate to large quantities of water being delivered by your water company. The accumulated total can grow rather quickly, especially when your website is popular / visited by many people.
Your hosting contract includes an 'adequate' amount of data traffic bandwidth included in the hosting price you may use within a period of time (mostly a month), and your site obviously has been so busy, that this amount of data traffic has been exceeded in the current period.
Whenever you see this error message please contact us as soon as possible
Basically you have 3 options:
(1) remove some content, in case you are offering large files for download; check the logs to be sure where the traffic goes
(2) upgrade your present contract with your hoster to a bigger contract giving you more resources
(3) move the entire site to another hoster who gives you even more data traffic bandwidth - this third option really doesn't apply!!
Because what we will do is just increase your quota!!!
Sometimes it takes us a little while to determine how much bandwidth your site will need and we adjust to suit.
In case you are operating an own server and your site is not that big, then check if your server may have been rooted/compromised and now serves as a hacked pirate download center for others.
