Daily data transfer limit

[#1]

Do people think that the daily data transfer limits are too restrictive?.
Reading the postings of users over time it is clear that many people have sites  where the traffic can be virtually zero hits for several days, weeks or months, and then have many thousands of hits in a short period of time that takes them over the daily transfer limit causing the site to be removed.
Based on the fact that all paid accounts are on a monthly contract, I think that the data transfer limit should be based on monthly useage rather than daily useage.
What do others think?

[#2]

Quote from: Devonports

... Based on the fact that all paid accounts are on a monthly contract, I think that the data transfer limit should be based on monthly useage rather than daily useage. ....

I think that really depends on what happens when you exceed your limit. If your site is blocked and it is earlier in the month then you could be looking at 20+ days of it not being available.
I would prefer to see a combination system with a monthly allowance based on the 250Mb per day plus a daily limit of 500Mb per day. That would allow for a sudden short surge in usage but keep within the current specification per month. Ideally this would be a base package with people being able to add extra bandwidth in a similar vain to the current BBYW products.

[#3]

The help pages say:
if your site has repeatedly exceeded its Daily Allowance, then your site may be removed. Note that we would contact you by email to inform you of such changes
This suggests that there is nothing set up to be able to enforce the limit, such as blocking.
So the policy is most applicable in the case where a website gradually gets more and more popular until it is "repeatedly exceeding its Daily Allowance", at which point it needs to move to a proper hosting service.  This is absolutely what ought to happen.
The situations that Devonports is referring to above, where something or other (perhaps unintended) sets off excessive hits and data transfer, are not handled by the current set up.
How long would the exceptional data transfer have to go on for to reach the "repeatedly exceeding" criterion?  In reality, there would be the much more urgent problem of the overload, even if only for one or two (or three?) days.
It sounds like the only way the plus.com webserver can be protected from this kind of "attack" is by removing the "offending" website.
So perhaps the answer includes some kind of blocking as suggested by Spider, rather than removal, which actually is not appropriate to deal with such an exceptional spike.
(Incidentally, I'm still looking for the place where I can see my data transfer figures.  The Help Page says Your daily traffic can be viewed from the Webstats tool in your website settings. but when I click any of my website domains on my Webstats page I get a 404 Page not Found)

[#4]

Hello
Yes, this is also a question for me. I am worried that the indexing services by Google etcetera can cause heavy peaks.
Sample:
                            Hits      Bytes        Date
Yahoo Slurp 4460+125 77.31 MB 22.01.2008 - 23:12
Googlebot   2511+26   43.70 MB   22.01.2008 - 23:54
So, there was nearly seventhousand hits (7000) just before midnight by two on one day of the month.

However, there is a lot of other indexing machines which cause this kind of hidden traffic. They tend to do all their indexing on the same date, so e.g. on the 22nd January it was 7 of them. So what shall I do about that? I cannot lock them out, because the indexing is essential for to be present on the net.
On all other times my traffic is only a few MB a day. So I hope, that PlusNet will at some point re-consider their calculation policy on the daily versus monthly allowances.
Cheers

[#5]

Isn't the solution to move any hosted web sites onto slower/cheaper hardware if they drastically exceed their allowances - with a move back to normal hosting after a set time in the "sin bin"?
If this happens repeatedly, the offender is going to move their site to commercial hosting.

[#6]

This topic was raised back last September as PUGIT 366 with discussion in the Pugit comments forum
You may want to look at these to see some of the previous input and PlusNet responses.  If you do look at the PUGIT 366 entry add your vote, it does help PlusNet assess the merit of putting development resource on to resolve the issue.
As an aside, PUG are in the process of identifying a mechanism to automatically 'UP' the PUGIT vote count from polls such as this in the Community.  A challenge to the more technical members of the Community
MauriceC