Forum Moderators: phranque
I don't know what's the monthly bandwidth usage for the previous months and right now I have no way to contact my friend to verify if 10GB for 10 days is normal (judging that he lived with this limit for 2 years, it can't be!). The number of hits per day had doubled for the last weekend and accounted for about 60% of the usage, so I'm suspecting that someone had pinned the site...But I heard that usually pinning a site crashes the server, not just exceeds your bandwidth...So now I have no clue why this had happened. According to the webstats, the number of pages requested each day is 20K...is that too high for a forum this size? Also, since the number of guests online is more than twice of members, and currently the forum allows full access of posts for guests, would it solve the bandwidth problem if I restrict guest viewing of posts? But the forum had allowed full guest access before and was fine...
I had never managed a forum before, and am starting to learn everything from scratch this week..It will be grateful if anyone can help me...My friend's forum is oen of the best forum of culture and literature in China...I would kill myself if I ruined it....
Your bandwidth usage sounds quite realistic and even rather low - forum pages can tend to be heavy at the best of times, and forum members tend to view a lot of pages with each visit. It may well be that your friend has exceeded with bandwidth limit frequently, but if the hosting company isn't enforcing the rules they might not have noticed. I run one forum with only 50 members and 2-3000 posts a month, and my bandwidth usage amounts to 4Gb per month - your forum is much larger.
Do you allow guest posting on the forum, or is it viewing only? I wouldn't recommend disabling guest viewing, because it would restrict access to the search engines, and your site would disappear from the search-engine results. However, you could ensure that guests and those not logged in were presented with a simpler interface without member signatures, avatars and such, and you should disallow all guest posting.
Make sure you tread carefully and slowly with any changes, and do your homework first - analyze the traffic you are receiving? Are most of your hits from real visitors or are they bots? Are the bots getting "trapped" due to session IDs or other similar problems? Are there any bad/undesireable bots which you could ban via robots.txt or other methods, thus reducing bandwidth usage?
When you mention a php forum, are you talking about phpBB or another board?
And yes, the host is reinforcing bandwidth and my site can be accessed no more, that's why I'm going crazy right now...The forum allows guest viewing but not posting, and it does not contain alot of large pics, flashes,etc. All uploads of files have to be approved by me, and I guess right now, from the situation of your bbs, that the mere access of threads is bandwidth consuming enough. Then it means the minimum bandwidth should be 30GB for my forum? That's bad news, because my friend had just paid for webhosting for next year, and I don't think either he or me can afford buying 20GB more bandwidth...But thanks anyway, I think I'll try to live with that 10GB...although I don't know how...
