Now dont flame me if this is the wrong place, it was either this or web hosting but i wasnt sure :/ anyway, my question. Downtime is when you host goes down which leaves you web pages unavailable to view, would it also be categorized as downtime if you go over your bandwidth limit?
It depends what happens when you go over your bandwidth limit. Does the site disappear? Does the site have one of those generic "over limit" pages? What page type is being returned to bots when they get to your site? redirect? 500 error?
No, in short, it would not be downtime if the customer goes over their limits. You can't fault the host and claim they are "down" simply because the site saw an increase of traffic, which is easily solvable by upgrading the hosting package. The customer signed up to a specific plan and is usually well aware of the limits before signing up. Now downtime for the website(s) themselves, then yes, it is technically "down" for lack of a better term, but not the hosting provider.
If you view it from Googles perspective, it's not much different from appearing offline. Google wants users to have a good experience. As we've seen, they are now incorporating site speed into the mix. A site that is slow, is the same as a site that isn't working. While downtime is about the worst thing, having a site that can't handle the traffic google sends it will only upset google as well. They sent you someone, expecting you to be up, now you're not up, or you're serving a page saying you're not up. You can fault the host by saying they didn't adequately prepare their site for traffic (eg a slow site). Not much different than being down, or being extremely slow. The end result is the customer is getting frustrated. Which they ding you for.
While I agree in the aspect of SEO/Google you've mentioned, but if a customer goes over their allotment of bandwidth, which is what the TS stated, you cannot fault the host at all IMO, this has nothing to do with the host not being able to supply the page when requested, but everything to do with the customer neglecting to upgrade their package to allow more bandwidth. Some hosts allow you to set up the account for overage instead of showing a default suspended page, so you will be charged a small amount for the extra usage, but the site will be available regardless of if you're over the bandwidth limit or not.
True, but the general nature of the question makes me believe the poster isn't really sure about his question, and might not have been asking the right question. And when I said Host, I meant the customer, not the hosting provider not making appropriate calculations. Downtime is generally when a server is completely offline (in technical terms) in business terms if your site isn't accessible, its also downtime to most managers.
depends on your bandwidth plan. If it switches to $$ per MB you will have no downtime. If it is a hard limit, you will get some kind of "if you owner of this site please contact your hosting provide" lame redirect for every page of your site, so yes it is downtime
Basically, i don't have any idea about bandwidth. For this purpose i want to learn the concept of band width. If some one have knowledge about bandwidth then share with me in simple ways that i can understand it easily.
What's not to understand? Bandwidth or transfer limits in other words is the amount you are aloud to use in a monthly period. For example, if your website sends a 1Mb file to someone 250 times in a month, you've used 250Mb of bandwidth/transfer that month for that file...Your host will usually place a limit on the allowance per month of bandwidth usage.