Traffic of a website simply means the total hits a website gets to all of its pages. But when it comes to web hosting the traffic may be referred to as total hits multiplied with the size of each page those hits were received. This is directly related to the bandwidth of a website. So web hosting traffic can also be called as bandwidth usage. If your web page has a big content size or a lot of images videos etc then you need a lot much bandwidth than a plain text page content. If you have an unlimited bandwidth hosting then this must not be a concern. But shared hosting plans with very high bandwidth usage may sometimes get into trouble.
The topic of hosting involves many different aspects; reliability, customer support, pricing, add-on features, programming, and allowable installation of PHP and other popular marketing scripts. Today, I'm going to focus on ONE topic, traffic, and the effects it has on your web site's hosting. The simple one word answer here is 'Bandwidth'. By definition, Bandwidth is the measurement of data, and the speed at which it flows through the phone lines, cable or DSL lines to transfer information to and from a web site via your computer.
In relation to your web site hosting, Bandwidth measures this flow of data transfer, otherwise termed 'Traffic'. In plain English, it's the number of hits you receive to your site; pure volume multiplied by the file sizes included on your pages. So, if you have an all text based web site, you would be able to receive more traffic, at lower bandwidth numbers, than you would if you have a 'graphics' intensive page, which would naturally have higher file sizes that are being transferred from your site to your visitor's browser.