Difference between incoming and outgoing Bandwidth

Question

I'm on Linode (an awesome VPS provider) and planning to move to RackSpace due to bandwidth costs.

In my linode, under the Network section it currently says

# Incoming: 86.3 GB
# Outgoing: 4.34 GB
# Total: 90.7 GB

The numbers might look strange, but these are real.

My application makes requests to Twitter API and fetches huge amount of data ( this is normal, do not worry :P ). That's what made it use 86 GBs. Does the 86 GBs count toward the incoming bandwidth? I'm using the Twitter REST API and I make HTTP POST requests. Does this really count towards the "incoming bandwidth" on RackSpace ?

Should I put the same values to get proper cost? I need to be sure about this before I migrate. Because I plan to have 1 TB of incoming data (as per Linode).

I'm having hard time understand the difference between incoming and outgoing bandwidth after looking at the numbers in my linode.

Answer 1

Incoming and outgoing bandwidth measures packets flowing each way... The REST request counts towards outgoing, and the response from the server counts towards incoming. Since the majority of the REST data you are working with is in fact the large amounts of data you are fetching from twitter, yes, the incoming data, as shown, is around 86 GB.

Answer 2

Incoming bandwidth is data that is being transferred to your server from another server. Outgoing is data that is being sent from your server to another one. And, yes, these will count towards the incoming/outgoing costs on RackSpace.