Bandwidth woes

possible drone / malicious unknown activity?

[mmubashar]

Guys, I bought this hosting from webhostserv.com which offers 2GB of bandwidth every month. It is more than enough usually for me. At most, my bandwidth has reached 350MB. However, this month, my bandwidth is going nuts! Currently, the level is 3293.17MB! What much can be done with the 50MB storage to reach up to 3.5GB? My hosting is using the cPanel Build 10.8.1-RELEASE 113
Can anyone please let me know how to detect (if any) mallicious contents and where is my bandwidth actually going. This morning, the admins just added the bandwidth limit for me, and within minutes, it rise another 293MB. That's really insane! Can anyone please guide me.

ShahZ

[freewebsiteideas]

Take a look at your stats in cpanel. What do you see?

[mmubashar]

Thanks for the feedback. Did you mean the server status? Here is print screen of it:

[img467.imageshack.us...]

Thank you..

[LifeinAsia]

Look at your logs and/or stats program to see where the traffic is coming from. Perhaps your site was listed by a high profile site driving a lot of traffic you way. Or perhaps some scumbag on MySpace.com or blog is hotlinking to images on your site. Perhaps your server has a virus/trojan.

[AlexK]

Ignoring (for the moment) malicious problems, and looking at normal web-master stuff, there are a few items that you may be able to get to grips with...

Across the last few weeks, and currently, Google has been going mad [webmasterworld.com] downloading every file on every server.

If your website consists of static files only, then the above will not be an issue for you after the 50MB host-limit has been aquired. If your site is dynamic (the screen-print does not show PHP or perl, although the Server Load looks a touch high) then that bot activity will be a big issue, since the bots would keep requesting the same files. You could fix that (PHP only) by integrating this Content-Negotiation class [webmasterworld.com] into your website.

The final item is people using site-scrapers to get your whole site in a couple of minutes. You can fix that (once again, PHP-only) with this PHP code [webmasterworld.com].

Good luck.

[mmubashar]

Guys, thanks for the response. But I still quite dont understand. Please bear with me as Im not really good at hosting administration yet. Still learning. Today, after a few days, my bandwidth has rise up to 7312.26 Megabytes compared to the usual 300MB i use. Suddenly something is not running good. Can anyone please guide me step by step? Urgent matter please.

[zomega42]

Step by step instructions

Step 1. You need to see your server stats. That's not "status", it's "stats". The image you posted was status. Stats tell you what pages were downloaded when and by who. I don't know if/how this works in cpanel but it should be there. Common stat programs include awstats, urchin, webalizer, etc. Just look around in cpanel for your stats.

Step 2. There is no step two. You just need to see your stats. They will tell you where all your bandwidth is going.

[seanpecor]

Yes, you need to see your stats, that much data transfer for such a small site might be normal after traffic ramps up. But you want to look at web transfer statistics (number of unique visitors, pages requested etc) and your server statistics. If your web transfer statistics are much much smaller than your server transfer statistics then something outside of the web service is consuming bandwidth. In that case the possibilities are a hacker intrusion that is utilizing your box to launch probes on other servers, or some el1t3 kidz have set up a warez anonymous ftp site on your server.

If it's web related, make sure you don't have cgi scripts creating dynamic pages that may create an endless number of unique urls to spider. It's unlikely, but if it's the case then spam harvester bots may be circling around endlessly on your server requesting pages.

In any event don't panic. Maybe your traffic just ramped up. A 2gb transfer allotment is pretty small, and 7gb is still not a helluvalot of transfer.

Sean

[AlexK]

PS
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

You can get a lot of help here, but pay attention to what the folks trying to help are saying.

One thing that will immediately focus the mind - is your site static files only, or is it dynamic? Also, what is the max number of web-pages + other downloadable files?

[mmubashar]

Thank you so much guys. I managed to get to the stats. It seems like an image has been viewed so many times that it is the one which is draining the bandwidth. The percentage of b/w (out of 7.5GB) this image has used is 94%. I have activated the hotlink protection for images, now we'll see if this image is being used outside of the domain. Thanks a lot guys. I shall update you with more info later.

ShahZ