The monthly traffic characteristic, which is sometimes also referred to as bandwidth or data transfer, refers to the overall volume of data which can be uploaded to your shared web hosting account and downloaded from it every month. Your site traffic is generated primarily by site visits - each time somebody loads your website, the pages they view are downloaded from the hosting server to their computer system or mobile device and they're shown by the web browser. What counts towards the traffic generated is the overall size of these webpages, thus the more website visitors you have for a period of time, the more website traffic will be generated. In addition to the web site visits, file uploads will also be counted towards the total monthly transfer which means that if you upload site content or some other files with a file manager or an FTP application, they'll also generate some site traffic. The counter resets on the very first day of each month and it is not related to the date you have signed up and the date you have renewed your hosting package.