Sometimes, popular content, inefficient third-party widgets, or excessive image sizes can cause your data traffic to spike, which in turn can lead to overage charges.
Overage is charged whenever you exceed the data transfer limit of your service plan: Plans & Pricing
Data transfer above the monthly plan limit is automatically billed at an additional $1.50/GB.
NOTE: You can monitor your data transfer in go.metropublisher.com when logged in as Owner under the "Usage" menu item.
A spike can happen if a story is picked up by social media and goes viral. A less exciting potential cause can be a very large image or PDF file that was downloaded often, e.g. on a popular page.
Large images used on Sprockets that are displayed on many pages across your site can also cause spikes. As you can imagine, an image of over 4MB loaded frequently over the course of a month will quickly add up in terms of data use.
Ideally, you should keep images used frequently or used on landing pages (section pages) under 0.5MB. Less is better!
Image compression options in Metro Publisher are outlined here:
Lossless Image Compression Quality
Our servers only show us the aggregate data usage should you run into a spike, so an analytics service you use would be a better place to look at your traffic and investigate the cause for unusual amounts of data traffic. They can pinpoint specific pages.
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