01.25.13
by

Bandwidth usage problem


My website consume 5gb of bandwidth in a month. Now all of the sudden we spend 9GB A DAY! How is this even possible. There are no downloadable files or media. Also there is no stuff linked to other sites like vids or images. Anyone got any ideas?

My image hosting site used around 25GB per day! What host are you using and did you go over your allowed bandwidth?

Spiders does not consume many bandwidth

I’d suggest taking a look at the raw Apache logs and checking to see if you have a particular file that’s hit far more than the others, and/or strange referrers for image files etc.

If you find either of those things, it’s possible that you have someone hotlinking to some image and using it on a very popular site. That’s the only feasible explanation I can think of right now.

you ask your hosting provider to help identify the problem

The traffic seems to come from the apache server or at least that is what the stats say. The detailed apache stats are just one big textfile.

Is it possible searchbots like googlebot are sucking that much BW?

I have taken a look on the apache logs but thats just a huge textfile. I also monitored the BW usage very closely. Every 5 minutes or so i checked the meter and nothing hapened. The all of the sudden it jumped up with almost 2GB in 5minutes, very strange. Our host isnt very helpfull either. Basically the only answer i get from him is that we must be ruuning a corrupt script or something.

That sounds like either a corrupt script (one that redirects in an endless loop or one that does a large data dump comes to mind) or a bot.

Have you compiled your logs into stats and checked for IPs that consume large amounts of bandwidth or pages that do the same?

It could be possible that your host control panel “mis-calculate” your Bandwidth usage