Understanding Data Objects

Data is at the heart of every application, so it is important to understand how your application stores information across various databases and tables.

Data is stored in various formats, structures, and methods. It will also contain various relationships to other areas of your application and may involve certain encryption techniques.

What is a data object?

A data object is a row of information stored in a database table. For example, details of a particular contact within a CRM count as one record or object, whether it includes just their name and email or more detailed information such as gender, date of birth, phone number, job title, and nationality.

Understanding how to structure your database tables is crucial for the longevity, scalability, and performance of your application and for determining the appropriate hosting plan. It's preferable to create your databases as relational so you can store less overall data and make them dynamic, making them easier to edit and maintain over time.

Since an object is a row of information within the database, you can store either a single piece of information about something or detailed information with hundreds of fields for the same piece of data.

The different types of data objects include:

• Activities
• Administrators
• API Keys
• CRM Companies
• CRM Contacts
• Custom Fields (all Modules)
• Database Items
• Ecommerce Orders
• Ecommerce Payments
• Ecommerce Discounts
• Events
• Event Discounts
• Event Tickets
• Event Venues
• Locations
  
• Location Categories
• Opportunities
• Profiles
• Redirects
• System Fields (all Modules)
• System Logs
• Tasks

How am I charged?

Insites offers a unique pricing model that allows you to pay based on the amount of data you use, regardless of the number of administrators or users for your application.

Data Objects are charged by the peak number of objects during a given month. For example, if you start the month with 1,000 objects, add 500, and then delete 750, your peak will be calculated as 1,500 objects.

Your usage includes system data objects such as system fields and custom fields, but these have minimal impact on your overall usage and plan requirements.

It's important to note that the Insites Event Stream does not count toward your usage, and there are currently no limits or retention policies on events and history logs stored on staging or production instances.

In addition to the different plans available on multi-tenant instance hosting, you can also purchase small increments of specific feature usage called overages, which can help manage costs if you are slightly above a certain metric and don’t need to upgrade to the next plan with all the inclusions. For more information on overage costs, please see our pricing page.

What is not counted as a data object?

While many elements in your application are related to data objects, not everything within your instance will be counted toward your usage. Some examples of things not counted toward your data objects include:

• Event Stream events
• History/Audit logs
• CMS Pages
• CMS Layouts
• CMS Partials
• Assets
• CLI deployment logs
• DNS records
• Email Layouts
• SMS Layouts
  
  

How can I view my usage?

Understanding and monitoring your data storage to optimize your application and costs is crucial.

You can check your total data objects usage and breakdown within the Insites Console and Insites Instance Admin (IIA).

The usage is categorized by module, along with usage over time, so you can monitor and plan your data retention policies or determine when you should upgrade to the next plan.

How to estimate usage

We recognize that estimating the number of data objects you will use can be challenging. Therefore, by answering a few questions, we can help you determine which instance hosting plan would be most suitable for your application.

• Number of CRM Companies?
• Number of CRM Contacts?
• Opportunities per month?
• How many activities do you record a day?
• Ecommerce orders per month?
• Number of custom databases?
• What is the average number of form submissions per month?
• Average number of items per database?
• How many different profiles do you require?
• Number of events per month?
• The average number of people per event?
• Number of locations you have?