Just a quick question...  If I were to install a chat portal, would that eat up my monthly bandwith if people were to chat in it on a regular basis?  Thanks in advance!

thanks...i'll check it out and see what happens when i get an estimated amount of traffic from my website.  appreciate the help.  

If its a refresh type chat then every time it refreshes it has to load the text part of that page again. Multiply the number of refreshes per minute by the number of users by the minutes each user stays connected by the size of that page and there is your transfer usage

It would only eat up your transfer. Bandwidth isn't a worry (although many people consider them the same)

No.. they are different

Hence why hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth are lying, but there is some truth in 'unlimited transfer'.

Transfer is the amount. Bandwidth is the width of the 'pipe'.

Take a car on a 2 lane road going 100/hr and 4 cars going 100/hr on a 4 lane highway side by side.

Both are going the same speed. They will get to their end destination in the same amount of time. That is transfer.
Bandwidth is how many cars can do it at the same time.

Just like some home connections may have a 4 meg/s connection but the ISP secretely limits the open connections to say 30. So they can only have 30 connections open.

If you go and get a high cost business connection for 4 meg/s you may be allowed 100s of simultanious connections.

The business connection would allow you to send alot mroe data.. it would appear fast as there isn't that same bottleneck in effect.

That might not make much sense.. but I tried :p

Better yet - your account is allowed to transfer 80 Gigabytes of data per month.

LP has lots of bandwidth (in other words - an amazing connection) so you can use that transfer up in a matter of minutes, or over a whole month.

- Ed