Why do I get a "Sorry, this site is temporarily unavailable!" message when I visit my site?
As a free Yahoo! GeoCities site, the site will be made available again within an hour after being disabled for exceeding the data transfer limit.
What is data transfer?
Whenever a visitor comes to the site, data is sent from our web servers to the visitor's computer. This data can be composed of web pages, images, movies, sound files, programs, compressed files, or anything else on the site that can be viewed or downloaded by visitors. When all this requested data is added up, then you have a total data transfer.
How is data transfer measured?
This data is measured in bytes. So let's first look at what a byte is. A byte is the unit most computers use to represent a character such as a letter, number, or typographic symbol (for example: y, 6, or ?). Even characters you do not see, such as blank spaces ( ) and characters comprising HTML tags (<title>) also are stored in a computer as bytes.
Here's an example:
Let's say you have a one-page web site. Your one web page is 20,000 bytes in size --
or about 20 thousand characters. This web page also contains a picture of your dog.
The size of this image is 30,000 bytes. When you add the size of both files together,
the total data transferred to view this web page and its image is 50,000 bytes (20,000
+ 30,000 bytes = 50,000 bytes). When a visitor comes to your site and views the
page, 50,000 bytes of data are requested and then transferred. If your page is viewed
50 times on one day, that amounts to 2,500,000 bytes of data transfer (50 views x
50,000 bytes = 2,500,000 bytes of data transfer). As you can see, these numbers can
contain a lot of zeros. That's why we have shortcuts when talking about these large
numbers of bytes. Read on to see how this is done.
Kilobytes, Megabytes, and Gigabytes
To make it easier to talk about large numbers of bytes, we place kilo, mega, or giga in front of the word "byte." This makes it easier to read and write these numbers without all the extra zeros.
What they mean:
kilo = 1,000
mega = 1,000,000
giga = 1,000,000,000
For example:
10 kilobytes of data is equal to 10,000 bytes.
10 megabytes of data is equal to 10,0000,000 bytes.
10 gigabytes is equal to 10,000,000,000 bytes!
An even shorter shortcut:
10 kilobytes can be written as 10KB, 10 megabytes is 10MB, and 10 gigabytes is
10GB.