bandwidth exceeded

need ya help

[angel vickie]

Hi all,

Im very new to this website lark and have been running a website...fine...until its come up saying my bandwidths been exceeded and i dont know what to do..as i cant get on any part of the site to sort it out.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Vickie

[Romeo]

Hi Vickie and welcome here on Webmasterworld.

Your provider contract most likely includes some amount of data traffic bandwidth included in the hosting price you may use within a period of time (mostly a month), and your site obviously has been so busy, that this amount of data traffic has been exceeded in the current period.

Perhaps your site has grown too big to fit into your current contract any more.

I fear we can't be of much help here and you should contact your hosting company about this.

Basically you have 3 options:
(1) remove some content, in case you are offering large files for download; check the logs to be sure where the traffic goes
(2) upgrade your present contract with your hoster to a bigger contract giving you more resources (for a higher price, of course)
(3) move the entire site to another hoster who gives you even more data traffic bandwidth

In case you are operating an own server and your site is not that big, then check if your server may have been rooted/compromised and now serves as a hacked pirate download center for others.

Regards,
R.

[Rosalind]

Your options are to get a better hosting account, or reduce the amount of bandwidth you get through. Free hosting or hosting with your regular ISP is often very stingy with bandwidth, so you'll be stuck until the end of the day/week/month waiting for your next quota of it.

You can reduce the bandwidth you use in many ways, and it doesn't have to involve fewer visitors. Optimise and crop images so the file size is reduced. Optimise your html by using css and a decent editor (not Frontpage or Word, which leave loads of comments and other fluff in your html files). Finally, ban undesirable robots from eating your bandwidth using robots.txt and your .htaccess file.

You won't be able to change the .htaccess file if you're on free hosting, but it's very powerful once you learn what it can do. You can use it to prevent people from hotlinking to your images, which is one possible reason that your bandwidth may have been exceeded. You may also be getting visits from referrer spam bots. If you notice any suspicious-looking referrers in your log files such as repeated hits from pages that don't link to you, you can also ban these using .htaccess.

The biggest culprit is usually images, so reducing the files sizes on them is probably your first priority.

[Voltec]

If your site has been fairly popular (which is the reaon you went over bandwidth), then you want to act fast so you don't lose too many visitors. If you want to upgrade on the same host, simply contact them and let them know - most would turn the site back on pretty much immediately. If you have to move to another host, this is going to take a bit longer to do with changing the DNS. Again though, if you don't have a copy of the website on your local machine (and let's home you do), you will have to contact your current host to see if they will give you access via ftp to get your updated files. Some but not all web hosts are reasonable and would give you access to download them - some just turn off the http so you can still ftp as necessary.

But, come up with a plan quickly so you get your website back up quickly. In the future, keep an eye on your stats so you can see this coming and upgrade as necessary.

Hope everything works out. Reply back if you have other questions on options or how to move...

Matt

[mack]

You may be able to take measures to conserve bandwidth. One site I used to run was run from a database but the script in use created static html pages based on templates. What I did was to work on the templates to make them as small in terms of file size as possible. Then when the script built the pages the disk space they ocupied was greatly reduced. This would also reduce the bandwidth you use when users download your pages.

It's a long shot but probably the only thing I can suggest other then upgrading your account.

Is your site very image intensive? Perhaps you could locate your images on another server so spread the load?

Mack.