Traffic Limits

Why we limit your data

You can’t always predict how much traffic your website will get. When something on your site goes viral, you might get 10x your expected monthly traffic in a day. Other services would send you a surprise bill for 10x your expected cost.

We think that’d be a pretty rude thing to do.

Alternatively, we could give you your full website capacity at once. Then, if your traffic spikes on the 5th day, you’d get no data for the remainder of the billing period.

That doesn’t seem very useful. You wouldn’t have any insight into performance for almost the whole month.

Instead, Request Metrics breaks your traffic capacity into per-minute blocks that get consumed throughout the month. This gives you an even sampling of data, regardless of traffic patterns.

How limits works

You allocate page view traffic to a website for the number of page views you expect to monitor in your monthly billing period. For example, let’s use 100,000 page views. Dividing that across every minute in the month is about 2.31 page views per minute. We round that up and add some buffer, giving you about 5 page views per minute.

Every minute, Request Metrics will record the first 5 page views to your website. If a 6th page view happens during that minute, it might be subject to your limits and excluded. At the start of the next minute, the count is reset and new traffic will be captured again.

Data bursting

Many websites have traffic bursts during certain parts of the day, and quiet other times. To help you get the most out of your traffic capacity, the Request Metrics limits support bursting. We look at the average traffic over the last 12 hours for your website, and if it’s less than your limits, we “burst” your limits higher to let you use up that missed capacity.

Checking your usage

All the statistics about your page view usage and limits being applied is available in your account on the Usage page. You can see both the total traffic as well as the traffic that exceeded your limits for the previous 30 days.

How to avoid hitting your limits

If you find that your website is hitting its limits a lot and you’d like to capture more of that traffic, you’ll need to allocate more traffic capacity to that website, which will increase your minutely limits and burst as well. You may have to allocate 1.5x-2x the total expected traffic to avoid limiting completely. We’re happy to help you right-size your subscription, contact us.

Monitoring a subset of your website

You can also reduce your overall traffic by monitoring a subset of your website, rather than the entire thing. This can be helpful if there are certain pages that are more important than others.

Simply install the Request Metrics agent on the pages that you want to monitor, and leave if off the pages that you do not. You could use a Tag Manager to do this by setting a custom rule for which pages get our tag, or with custom logic in your website platform.